India’s digital transformation is accelerating, but so are cyber threats, making security central to business growth. To spotlight this shift, Fortinet and The Times of India Group have launched Fortifying Digital Bharat, a thought leadership programme focused on cybersecurity, AI and digital transformation. The series begins with Securing India’s Growth Engines, featuring conversations with organisations that are using cybersecurity to support innovation and growth.

The campaign features conversations with Fortinet’s customers, highlighting how leading organisations are using cybersecurity to accelerate digital transformation while strengthening resilience. The first conversation explores how a leading technology organisation is using AI, automation and threat intelligence to build a more resilient and future-ready security operation. Building Digital Guardrails

As organisations expanded mission-critical platforms using modern Digital platform across its India cloud data centres, its security operations had to keep pace with growing scale, complexity and regulatory expectations. The company needed to protect highly regulated, multi-tenant cloud environments while ensuring compliance with evolving data sovereignty and cybersecurity requirements.

At the same time, the Security Operations Centre (SOC) was struggling with a rapidly growing volume of security alerts, manual investigation and triage processes, fragmented visibility across customer environments.

Sophisticated ransomware campaigns, AI driven attacks and evolving regulatory requirements further increased the need for faster detection, automated response and integrated threat intelligence from agencies including CERT In, RBI, DSCI and i4C.

IT Organisations have recognised that conventional security operations would no longer be sufficient. It needed to transform from a reactive security model to an AI-driven, proactive cyber resilience framework. “Security has to be embedded into digital transformation from the very beginning rather than being added later,” said Arunkumar Selvaraj, Global Head of Cybersecurity of Cloud Business unit.

Transforming Security Operations

To support this transformation, Fortinet helped build an AI powered next generation SOC. The initiative focused on deploying AI driven security analytics, automated security orchestration and incident response, a centralised threat intelligence platform and the integration of intelligence from FortiGuard Labs alongside CERT In, RBI, DSCI and i4C.” Cybersecurity today has to operate at the speed of the machine,” Arunkumar said.

The transformation fundamentally changed the role of the SOC. Instead of simply responding to cyber incidents, the SOC became an intelligent, AI-enabled cyber defence platform capable of identifying threats earlier, automating investigations and accelerating response.

Fortinet’s integrated security platform helped improve Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), reduce Mean Time to Respond (MTTR), strengthen regulatory compliance, improve visibility across cloud environments, automate threat detection and incident response, centralise threat intelligence from multiple trusted sources and build a resilient security architecture for future cloud expansion.

“The solution from Fortinet strengthened regulatory compliance, improved threat detection and response, and integrated threat intelligence to proactively defend against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats,” Arunkumar said.

The India cloud SOC also became the blueprint for deployment across the global data centres.

Beyond its own transformation, Arunkumar said that it applies the same philosophy when helping customers strengthen their cyber resilience. Rather than focusing solely on deploying security technologies, They evaluated an organisation’s overall security maturity, identified operational gaps and helped customers strengthen their cyber posture without disrupting business operations. “Security is a continuous journey of improvement rather than a one-time compliance exercise,” he said.

The Next Phase of Cyber Resilience

The future of cybersecurity will depend on collaboration between intelligent automation and skilled professionals, rather than one replacing the other. That is why partnerships between enterprises and specialist cybersecurity providers are becoming increasingly important. “As India’s digital economy continues to accelerate, cybersecurity has become a foundational enabler of growth rather than simply a defensive function,” says Vishak Raman, Vice President – Sales, India & SAARC, SEA and ANZ, Fortinet.

Selvaraj also underscored the importance of industry-wide collaboration. “India’s cybersecurity framework cannot be built by technology providers alone. Large system integrators, cybersecurity companies, regulators, cloud providers and government agencies must collectively develop standards, share intelligence and establish governance frameworks capable of keeping pace with emerging technologies such as AI and quantum computing,” he said.

As data sovereignty rules push enterprises to host sensitive workloads in specific geographies, controlling who accesses that data matters as much as securing it — strong identity controls cut compliance risk and insider threats alike. “Security operations are evolving from reactive monitoring to intelligent, AI-driven capabilities that help organisations simplify complexity, improve resilience, and respond faster to an increasingly dynamic threat landscape,” says Raman.

As India accelerates AI adoption and digital transformation, cybersecurity will increasingly become a business differentiator rather than simply a compliance requirement. Organisations that build security into every stage of innovation will be better positioned to strengthen resilience, earn customer trust and support the next phase of India’s digital growth.

Note: This article is a part of ETCISO’s Brand connect Initiative.

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