CS-AWARE Corporation has successfully acquired EU funding for a new project. The project is called CS-AWARE-NEXT and builds on the legacy of the CS-AWARE project, from which the CS-AWARE Corporation originated.

The project application has been submitted under the new Horizon Europe Programme, and has been successfully evaluated for all three dimensions related to excellence, impact and the quality of the implementation.

The project’s focus is that of 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 expands the context to include local and regional supply chains in dynamic cybersecurity management, by fostering cooperation and collaboration between relevant stakeholders on this level.

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 very relevant to the prevailing European legislation for the Network and Information Security (NIS) directive. Especially for the issue of better integration of threat intelligence in operational cybersecurity management, in the project we promote the use of innovative artificial intelligence 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. ‘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. ‘The excitement is of course big for us, as we have been working on this for the last two years. However, it is our first priority to expand our customer base. We are ambitious and are planning to operate right across Europe.’

We are all excited to have been given the opportunity to continue to elaborate the ideas that have been so successfully developed by CS-AWARE, and research how best to improve cybersecurity management in the light of the ever increasing supply chain threat landscape.

The CS-AWARE team.