Dissemination actions are more than essential for the sustainability, scalability and successful course of an ambitious project. In the case of CS-AWARE early dissemination becomes a necessity, considering the pan-European nature and character of the applied research, currently implemented. So, when an opportunity arose to present the concept of CS-AWARE to a large number of public organizations, it was considered a good first metric with regards to the acceptance of the concept.
The venue was the yearly OTS Greek Forum, organized at the end of November in the city of Katerini – at the Northern part of Greece, traditionally attracting hundreds of delegates. This year the participants where approximately 300 hundred, representing more than 80 public organizations – amongst them ministries, municipalities, regions, water authorities, legal public entities and academic institutions. The main agenda of the FORUM was focused around innovative products & services that could improve the functionality of public organizations.
The CS-AWARE consortium was represented by its Greek partners OTS, Innosec & Municipality of Larisa. A fifteen minutes’ slot was allocated to present the project. OTS & Innosec introduced in a thorough and analytical way the concept of CS-AWARE.
They started by describing the concept of cyber-security in general, highlighting the current global status, analyzing the existing problem and the reasons we are focusing on that. By utilizing multiple examples, they commented on the negative financial and operational results from a cyberattack, on a public organization. Then they started introducing the concept of CS-AWARE. They presented its main principles, the requirements its covering, the solutions its offering and the advantages from its utilization, by an organization. Then an analysis of its architecture and its main building blocks (System & dependency analysis, Data collection & storage, Data analysis & decision making, Multilingual semantic support, Cybersecurity situational awareness & visualization, Cybersecurity information exchange, System Self-healing) took place. The presentation was concluded with a discussion on system interactions.
The feedback received was quite promising and participants seemed to fully appreciate the importance and the necessity of a complete product/service such as CS-AWARE. A genuine interest on the project’s progress was marked, enhancing the believe that the more familiar public organizations tend to get with the CS-AWARE concept, the more acceptance will receive.
George Apostolopoulos, PhD
OTS
