NEW DELHI: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Thursday has proposed a three-year action plan for Urban Co-operative Banks (UCBs) to enhance cyber security in the era of heightened digitisation, while ensuring that they measure up to their commercial counterparts.
In a document titled ‘Vision for Cyber Security’ for UCBs-2023’, the central bank said it aims to achieve the objective through a five-pronged strategy which includes developing own technology vision document outlining their plans to incorporate IT solutions into their business in a secure manner, creating a reserve or fund earmarked for implementing cyber security projects and forming a Board-approved IT governance framework that would appoint a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO).
According to the RBI, matters related to cybersecurity need to be part of discussion in board meetings. Considering the implementation of cyber security framework to be a costly affair, the responsibility for implementation, monitoring, compliance and response would have to be assigned from the Board level and percolate down till the end user, it added.
The new measures will also include proper monitoring of the lifecycle of hardware and software assets to prevent the risk of operating obsolete hardware or software systems.