SFI-NORCICS: An introduction to Work Package 3 - “Technologies, Applications, and Services“

In NORCICS we pursue an interdisciplinary approach. Why so? One of them is that it is needed in order to deal with the extremely complex societal, economic and technical system of systems that constitute the critical infrastructure and service provisioning. No single research area possesses insight in sufficient depth to be able to deal with the security and resilience challenges, even for a specific critical sector.

With the ongoing digitisation, we get improved services, better monitoring and control, and more efficient and dependable management and operations. However, it also leads to an increased complexity and opens for a wider spectre of threats. This makes ensuring security and resilience more challenging, and calls for innovations within the technologies, applications, and services we address in Work Package 3.

A foreseen development of the ongoing digitisation of critical sectors is that a common ICT infrastructure will provide services to all critical sectors — most pronounced when 5G is put to use, (which is far more than applying a new cellular access technology). This accentuates the challenges outlined above and may cause simultaneous failures across sectors. A consequence of the increased complexity and integration is that it is insufficient to regard a single threats, and protection against them, one at a time. Severe incidents are likely to be caused by simultaneous intentional and non-intentional incidents in various and seemingly independent parts of the system. The competence needed to come up with the means to prevent and handle these cases definitely calls for an interdisciplinary approach.

We are looking forward to the exciting and creative years ahead, and we will keep you updated on our work at: https://www.ntnu.edu/norcics and also at our LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube channels.