The European Network for Cyber Security (NeCS) directly addresses the training and development of a European talent pool to help implement and support the European Cybersecurity strategy as highlighted in the EC’s Digital Agenda.
As cyber-security is inherently multi-sectorial, the NeCS participants (beneficiaries and partners), by design, span both the academic sector and the non-academic one. The NeCS network comprehensively collects and links multi-disciplinary expertise in the cyber-security area, ranging from social science and legal expertise for ICT to security metrics and risk assessment and mitigation techniques, to cyber-security technology, systems and operations, considering also information sharing aspects and regulatory compliance of information processing procedures. Further to the above, NeCS offers to trainees personalised research and innovation training plans that uniquely combine cutting edge science with exposure to real-life systems, data and case-studies together with specialized training in complementary soft skills with a strong emphasis on research exploitation, entrepreneurial and communication competence. This further enhances the competences of the 15 ESRs, in a rapidly growing and highly demanding job market for cyber-security that spans across industry, research/academia, regulatory bodies, and beyond.
In addition to the training capabilities developed within this network, NeCS will become a very significant asset for the European Research Area (ERA) enabling it to address the cyber-security challenges that are gaining continuous attention at all levels of European society.
NeCS’s explicit objective is to train the next generation of researchers and practitioners who will be able to meet the demand for careers in Cyber-Security and further Europe’s research excellence in the area. To achieve this, trainee researchers will have to develop skills and expertise that build on a fusion of aspects from IT and network security technologies, risk management, information assurance, international law and political sciences and social sciences. Particular emphasis will be placed on bidirectional transfer of knowledge between academic and commercial organisations and on coupling foundational research with practical “hands-on” technology experience and advanced prototyping. According to the initial findings of the European platform on “Network and Information Security (NIS)” there are at least three key areas that should be covered for cyber-security. They are risk management, information sharing and eventually cyber-security operations management.
