By Venkatesh Krishnamoorthy and Henry Young
October is International Cybersecurity Awareness Month, an annual opportunity for governments, businesses, and cybersecurity professionals around the world to assess progress and consider what comes next.
Cybersecurity Awareness Month is taking on heightened significance this year for two notable reasons. First, countries around the world — including India — are increasing their focus on sovereignty; second, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are reshaping the cybersecurity landscape. As recently as October 2026, the AI-accelerated threat landscape featured remote code execution exploits, AI agent intrusions, and vulnerable digital certificates.
Amid these developments, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) published two important documents on India’s Digital Sovereignty and a Global Cyber Agenda for an AI World.
For India, efforts focused on sovereignty will be successful if they are grounded in the ability to securely govern, operate, and rely on critical digital systems. Focus on the four pillars of capability, collaboration, resilience, and trust can strengthen India’s digital ecosystem while encouraging investment, supporting innovation, and reinforcing its role as a global technology leader.
At the same time, advances in frontier AI cybersecurity systems are changing how organizations defend against cyber threats. These technologies offer powerful new capabilities and underscore the need to both strengthen longstanding cybersecurity practices and adopt new ones. BSA’s Cyber Agenda identifies eight priorities for governments and organizations to improve their cybersecurity and resilience in an AI-enabled world.
Governments should encourage organizations to adopt AI-enabled cybersecurity solutions that better protect their citizens and customers. A voluntary public-private partnership could support a structured, transparent, predictable, and globally aligned phased rollout of frontier AI cybersecurity systems, giving trusted cybersecurity professionals a head start on malicious actors.
These capabilities must be supported by stronger vulnerability management, with investment in vulnerability identification and reporting infrastructure, support for patch development and deployment, and greater use of virtual patches and vulnerability shields. Replacing outdated systems and modernizing procurement practices would further support secure, updatable, and resilient technologies, including post-quantum encryption.
Preparing for disruption is equally important. Organizations should develop resilience plans, establish clear recovery objectives, adopt AI-enabled recovery tools, and regularly test restoration plans and processes. Streamlining and harmonizing cybersecurity requirements, particularly incident reporting and obligations across sectors and jurisdictions, can reduce compliance burdens and help organizations focus on strengthening security.
Alongside these efforts, governments should support risk-based transition plans for post-quantum cryptography by prioritizing high-value systems and modernizing legacy systems and procurement guidance where necessary. Progress across these priorities should be measured to ensure cybersecurity investments and requirements deliver measurable improvements.
On many of these priorities, India has already laid important groundwork. The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team has progressively strengthened its cybersecurity guidance, with its May 2026 blueprint on AI-assisted vulnerability exploitation, which recognizes the need for faster vulnerability detection, remediation, and stronger cyber resilience. India’s National Quantum Mission is advancing quantum secure communications, while the IndiaAI Mission, through its Safe and Trusted AI pillar and the IndiaAI Safety Institute, is supporting AI safety, security, and responsible governance. The Reserve Bank of India has also urged regulated entities to strengthen safeguards against AI-enabled cyber threats across their own systems and those of third-party service providers.
Building on these initiatives, India has an opportunity to strengthen cybersecurity through timely access to defensive frontier AI systems, accelerated adoption of post-quantum cryptography, and modernized public procurement practices that prioritize security and access to best-in-class technologies over misplaced local content requirements. Greater alignment of cybersecurity requirements across sectors can increase compliance and further strengthen India’s cyber resilience.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent call at the India Mobile Congress 2026 for a global framework to address cybercrime and AI-driven deepfakes reinforces the importance of international cooperation in tackling emerging cybersecurity threats. For India, the opportunity is to bring these priorities together in an approach that maintains sovereignty while supporting access to trusted global technologies and partnerships. Cybersecurity and digital sovereignty should be mutually reinforcing goals, with policies that prioritize measurable security outcomes, technology choice, and resilience.
By acting on these priorities now, governments, businesses, and cybersecurity professionals can strengthen cybersecurity and resilience, and see concrete improvements by October 2027.