In response to an increasing number of cyberattacks that have occasionally disrupted or stopped businesses from operating, the Employees' Provident Fund Organization intends to establish an internal next-generation security operations center (SOC).

Situated in Dwarka, New Delhi, the National Data Centre will be staffed by a group of security experts who will be in charge of keeping an eye out for any indications of a possible security incident and monitoring, analyzing, responding, and safeguarding the center's IT assets and services, including servers, network traffic (WAN, LAN, Local, Internet), endpoints, databases, web apps, and user identities.

In order to accomplish this, the EPFO has put out a call for bids, asking companies with experience in SOC implementation and commission to submit their best offers for setting up, commissioning, and running this kind of center for retirement fund managers.

The EPFO stated in the EoI that it "has decided to setup a 24x7x365 basis operating state-of-the-art Next Gen Security Operations Centre (SOC) for proactive monitoring as well as predicting cyber-attacks (internal and external) on the EPFO's IT environment, keeping in mind the regulatory requirements in India (CERT-In, NCIIPC) and increasing innovative cyber threats and malwares, threats emanating from emerging technologies like AI/ML, block chain, bots, dark webs, social engineering, cloud, etc.

The successful bidder will be required to develop, run, and maintain the center in addition to providing skilled labor for a term of five years. The company will eventually need to integrate it with Cert-In, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team established by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

The EPFO's action follows cyberattacks against organizations like AIIMS Delhi and the Madhya Pradesh e-Nagarpalika platform.

With 24.77 crore member accounts under management, the EPFO is among the biggest social security organizations in the world in terms of both clientele and amount of financial activities. Not only might a cyberattack affect its daily operations, but it may also result in unauthorized access to customer data.