The Government of India has made dramatic changes to its regulations for the tech industry, including allowing companies to run their own VPN service.
When the regulations were in place, companies could only use provider provisioned VPNs to allow their employees to securely access their corporate network, remotely.
This requirement has now been dropped making it easier for companies of all sizes to allow their employees to work remotely.
Curing policy paralysis
The move is aimed at reducing the compliance burden of India’s Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and IT enabled Services (ITeS) sectors.
Industry associations from India had previously called on the Indian Government to drop these regulations. They pointed out that these compliances were out of tune with the rest of the world and only added another layer of inconvenience for the IT sector already dealing with sagging bottom lines, accentuated by the pandemic.
The Indian Department of Telecom (DoT) had temporarily relaxed some of these guidelines at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in the country, first in March 2020, and then again in April 2020. It has now decided to scrap them entirely, and has also allowed for some further relaxations.
According to reports, under the new rules, using VPNs that are not provisioned by telcos is now allowed. Furthermore, companies are also now allowed to route their International call traffic over VPNs.
The liberalized VPN use is just one part of the new relaxed policy that will now help companies more readily adopt ‘Work from Home’ and ‘Work from Anywhere’ policies, as per a press note from the Government.
Via MediaNama