Progress & Expected Impact
The Challenges of ECOSSIAN are more than technical
Threats to and vulnerabilities of Europe's Critical Infrastructures are becoming the biggest risk to societies. Efficient protection will require joint responsibility and integrated cooperation among the CI operators, national governments and the EU. Although this has become evident in the last 15 years, operating solutions are still missing. ECOSSIAN will foster this 3-level cooperation by advanced technical solutions and workflows.
We need an approach integrating technology and policy
It will demonstrate how such integrated collaboration could work with the support of a trans-European support system. Expected obstacles from the individual views of CI providers, from differing interests of national governments, and from scepticism against the future role of the EU need be overcome. The societal interests like privacy and data protection will be assessed in the ECOSSIAN solution.
The solution requires interdisciplinary harmonization
A solution as envisaged in this project needs to deliver results in real time, interoperate with heterogeneous CI SCADA systems in a highly netted international environment. Disciplines from ICT, human science, politics and law, social sciences, ethics and psychology all need to contribute their skills, innovative ideas and their networks to convince the various sceptics.
We need forward-looking open minded stakeholders
Representatives from Industry, governments, the EU, and from media and NGOs will need to cooperate. In ECOSSIAN they are challenged to develop a role model for future cooperation and Public-Private Partnership. The success of this role model will be driven by the qualities of the ECOSSIAN technical solution and its support of procedures to be commonly agreed.
We want to support the European CIP process
Extensive work on CIP is on-going at EU level: - The Cyber Security Strategy; EPCIP; CIWIN; NIS platform; several legal and procedural directives and agreements between; joint exercises, to name but a few. They demonstrate the priority attention the EU pays to this subject. ECOSSIAN will offer substantial support to, and its impact will be evaluated against, these international cooperation and information sharing models.
We enable new solutions for a developing market
The security market is highly fragmented across governmental, private and international stakeholders. Market success will require the openness and cooperativeness of stakeholders discussed above. This can be incited by ECOSSIAN but needs to be developed and implemented by the EU. ECOSSIAN's market strengths lies in proposing new standards in cross-sector and trans-national CIP.
