By Adamantios Koumpis August 23, 2022
CS-AWARE Next Project successfully launched!!
A new Horizon Europe research project to help organisations and local & regional networks improve cybersecurity awareness and collaboration.
A pan-European consortium led by the University of Oulu in Finland has successfully launched a new Horizon Europe project. The project is called CS-AWARE-NEXT and builds on the legacy of the CS-AWARE project, that was part of the Horizon 2020 Programme, a predecessor of Horizon Europe. The project application has been been successfully evaluated for all three dimensions related to scientific excellence, societal and economic impact and the quality of the research plan implementation.
The core idea in the project relates to the introduction of dynamic cybersecurity management for organisations and local and regional supply chain networks, based on awareness and collaboration. While the original CS-AWARE project focused predominantly on cybersecurity risk and incident management in individual organisations, CS-AWARE-NEXT widens its scope to address local and regional supply and value chains, by fostering cooperation and collaboration amongst all relevant stakeholders to help improve competence for dynamic cybersecurity management. The project will run for three years, and covers important aspects of critical infrastructure protection and advanced techniques to ensure business continuity and disaster recovery. Apart from the cybersecurity awareness aspects, the project addresses aspects of cooperation and collaboration, socio-technical analysis, and risk and incident management.
The timing of CS-AWARE-NEXT is extremely relevant to the prevailing European legislation for the Network and Information Security (NIS) directive. Especially to the issue of facilitating the integration of threat intelligence in operational cybersecurity management, the project promotes the use of innovative AI and machine learning approaches and techniques.
The consortium is composed of 21 partners from eight member states namely Finland, Estonia, Austria, Italy, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Denmark, and is coordinated by the University of Oulu in Finland, that has been also the Coordinator of the original CS-AWARE project. ‘Building on continuity is important for us’ says Prof. Juha Röning, the coordinator of the project. ‘Many of the partners have also been members of the initial consortium, which has been complimented with new entrants.’
Dr. Thomas Schaberreiter has been the technical coordinator of the original CS-AWARE project and is now leading as CEO and CTO the team of the CS-AWARE Corporation, that is a partner in the new project and also a success story of the original project. ‘As a spin-off of an innovation project with all characteristics of a genuine deeptech, the excitement is of course big for us, as we have been working on this venture for the last two years. We are committed to bring our offerings across Europe.’
Christian Wieser, who has been the Project Manager of the first and has the same role in the new project mentions: ‘We have invested efforts in building a good working environment amongst all members of the consortium. It is not trivial at all to integrate organisations with different experiences, expertise and mentality and make a winning team out of it. The leading principle in our work is to promote an environment that is inclusive and empbraces diversity in all its aspects. Research in the project is interdisciplinary. This means that we need to cross many disciplinary boundaries to result to a holistic approach. As we all know, cybersecurity crosses the boundaries of several disciplines and traditional, monolithic approaches are of little or no value at all’.
Adamantios Koumpis