Reserve Bank of India Standards

In April 2010, the Reserve Bank of India published their Monetary Policy Statement, which recommended enhancing RBI guidelines relating to the governance of IT, information security measures to tackle cyber fraud. Following this statement, the Working Group on Information Security, Electronic Banking, Technology Risk Management and Cyber Frauds was constituted.

This group was assembled to provide common minimum standard for all banks to adopt as well as lay down the best practices for banks to adopt in a phased manner for a safer and sounder banking environment. These standards identify classification of information/data as one of the key components of information security management:

• “Information assets have varying degrees of sensitivity and criticality in meeting business objectives. By assigning classes or levels of sensitivity and criticality to information resources and establishing specific security rules/requirements for each class, it is possible to define the level of access controls that should be applied to each information asset.”
• “Banks need to establish a classification scheme that applies throughout the enterprise, based on the criticality and sensitivity (e.g. public, confidential, or top secret) of enterprise data.”
• "Classification of information reduces the risk and cost of over- or under- protecting information resources in aligning security with business objectives since it helps to build and maintain a consistent and uniform perspective of the security requirements for information assets throughout the organization."

The standards state that banks need to ensure implementation of basic organizational framework and put in place policies and procedures which do not require extensive budgetary support, infrastructural or technology changes, by October 31, 2011. The rest of the guidelines must be implemented within a period of one year.

TITUS classification solutions allow organizations to:

• Identify the value and sensitivity of information in order to manage, secure, and continue to promote sharing of that information.
• Comply with regulations
• Easily assign classifications and add visual markings into every email, document, and file
• Involve the most important part of information security: the user
• Embed metadata into every email, document, and file, allowing for the appropriate handling of the information by other solutions.

TITUS Message Classification supports the requirements of these standards. This easy to use solution enables Indian banks to comply with these standards by allowing users to classify their information before sending any electronic mail. TITUS Message Classification enables Indian banks to configure or modify the classifications for all of their users via TITUS' centralized administration tools that work with Microsoft Active Directory.

TITUS Classification for Microsoft Office enables Indian banks to comply with these standards by allowing users to classify their Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents before being saved or printed. TITUS Classification for Microsoft Office complements TITUS Message Classification which can check the sensitivity of a document attached in an email and ensure compliance to standards.

TITUS Classification for Desktop enables Indian banks to comply with these standards by allowing users to classify any file on their desktop. With TITUS Classification for Desktop, users can classify any file type such as maps, images, charts, multimedia files, and recordings through Microsoft Windows Explorer.