We have come a long way since the cyberwatching.eu project began back in Spring 2017. With a number of sustainable assets, cyberwatching.eu officially closed at the end of July 2021. Project partners are now making sure the project leaves a lasting legacy and continue to contribute to this evolving landscape.
cyberwatching.eu has delivered an EU Project Radar which gives a clarity to a busy landscape. The radar provides an interactive “birds-eye” view of the complete collection of EU-funded projects in the cybersecurity space. Over 260 projects are organised by high-level categories, their lifecycle stage and relative market and technology maturity. Users can also zoom in on technology and vertical sectors (defined by the EC’s JRC cybersecurity taxonomy) in order to identify projects that are focusing on these areas.
With 5 iterative versions dating back to 2018, the radar provides detailed analysis of the cybersecurity priorities over time. What is really special about the radar though is its live version. Managed directly by the projects it maps, researchers and innovators working in the EC R&I space can actually update their data in real-time and at the same time actually carry out a self-assessment on their market and technology readiness levels.
Behind the radar lies detailed information managed by a community of R&I projects. Realising the importance of supporting project-to-project collaboration to address technology and sector specific challenges, cyberwatching,eu has established six sector-specific clusters (health, energy, finance, critical infrastructure, GDPR, threat intelligence) involving over 25 projects and providing key support to deliver joint recommendations and over 10 webinars with them.
The policy landscape too has evolved in this period too in many ways with the cybersecurity Act, GDPR, NIS Directive etc. cyberwatching.eu partners have contributed to continued dialogue with ECSO, ENISA and the four Competence Centre Pilot projects. From organising the first of a number of joint-public workshops to providing documentation detailing activities and respective roadmaps, we have consistently engaged and contributed to supporting their dialogue and alignment between them.
We have also captured the evolution of the regulatory landscape in a key document “Building Strong Cybersecurity in the European Union” presented by the EC’s delegation visit to the US in 2019.
In addition, Cybersecurity and Privacy policy roadmaps (2019 and 2021) have chartered a course for Europe by building on already existing roadmap efforts and modules, domains, categories, taxonomies and concepts. This is an important effort to understand the commonalities and the differences in approach not only in Europe but also beyond. New technologies such as AI, Blockchain and IOT have emerged and with them new challenges which need to be addressed. cyberwatching.eu has provided a robust package of recommendations facing both the policy makers and supervisory authorities, to address stakeholders’ needs in this area.
Cyberwatching.eu has actively supported the SME community by providing events and online resources on privacy and cybersecurity best practices. The GDPR Temperature Tool and Information Notices Tool, provide guidance to SMEs, providing an overview of their compliance posture, and recommendations on how to move forward. The Risk Management Temperature Tool provides a first understanding of the cyber risks threatening their organisation and paves the way for putting in place correct risk assessment processes.
The Cybersecurity Label, created in partnership with the global leader of Testing, Inspections and Verifications SGS, provides a resource for SMEs to take a first step towards certification. Based on existing certification schemes, this self-assessment exercise includes the security requirements that any organisation should comply with in order to demonstrate that it has securely implemented basic logical systems and measures to protect their assets against cyber-threats.
Finally, the cyberwatching.eu marketplace has been further developed and improved in order to provide ECSO with a dynamic, semantic-based platform to showcase European excellence and services. With the data of over 500 SMEs secured and integrated onto the platform, the Hub will become a unique centralised and specialised platform that will unite the descriptions of European cybersecurity products and services in only one resource. The benefit for the regional clusters is the creation of single resource able to gather and link the European SMEs. This will be a key asset for the Regions in order to be recognised and validated as a Cybersecurity districts of Europe.
