Governments look beyond Android and iOS to secure devices

Governments across the world are deliberating over securing their digital footprint and sensitive data from New-Age hackers and an end-to-end, reliable and trustworthy operation system (OS) beyond Android or iOS is top of their minds.

Russian government via its national operator Rose Telecom recently acquired 75% of the "Aurora OS" platform built on Finnish firm Jolla's "Sailfish OS".

Russia with "Aurora OS" want to build a safe digital society with the Aurora OS for devices used across corporates and state-owned companies.

Jolla is also looking to license its platform for domestic OS for some of the countries.

Similarly, a Brazilian company "Sikur" has built a highly secure OS and software platform to be scaled across different devices from smartphones, trading stations, industrial IoT, PoS machines, wearables and so forth.

The time is ripe for the Indian government to join the bandwagon and look for a secure OS for its operations.

"In the world of geo-political tensions, tech cold war and protectionism, countries such as China, Russia and Brazil are trying to push for an OS which is more controlled and is privacy led to the actors outside of their home countries.

The Indian government should also strive to own such secure OS for devices part of its key operations," Neil Shah, research director, Counterpoint Research, told IANS.

Brazil government is already using "Sikur Phones" to make the devices and communication highly secure and private.

"We believe HarmonyOS is also a step in that direction to create a 'national OS' for China first and then scale it outside the country," Shah added.

Sikur has created a way to provide total security on any application, be it banking, stocks, news, cryptocurrency, wallets or email.

"Now, even WhatsApp runs on SikurOS. We can incorporate widely available apps if they meet SIKUR's security criteria," says the company.

On its foundation, the SikurOS does not demand the hassles of VPN links since the connections have several security layers by default.

The upcoming Sikur App Store will make it even more complete, adding the possibility of having more apps with enhanced security.

TizenOS from Samsung is also proliferating in TVs, IoT and smartwatches whereas LG is using webOS for TVs, appliances -- making the connected devices independent of Google Android, thus limiting its scale to smartphones only.

"The aim is to have a secure, independent OS solution and ecosystem to challenge the Google Android and Apple iOS duopoly in smartphones as the top three OS platforms in the world for key computing devices come from the US,' Shah noted.

In February, Rostelecom rebranded "Sailfish OS" as "Aurora".

Aurora supports all standard functions of a mobile OS: management of calls, contacts, and messages, mailing agent, browser, access to media, calendar, camera, gallery, watch and timers, work with documents and others.

It also supports functions of remote access to the workplace, including secure access to corporate email, messengers and IT systems.

The Russian government has plans to switch all state officials to the Sailfish OS, under a project expected to cost nearly $2.4 billion.

The government plans to switch around eight million state officials to the operating system of Russian origin by the end of 2021. Sailfish-powered smartphones will also be recommended to municipal administrations at various levels.