RazorSecure’s contribution to securing an open and resilient digital future
Dr Emma Taylor CISSP CEng FIMechE FSaRS
RazorSecure will be speaking at the UK National Cyber Security Centre's flagship conference CYBERUK 19-20 April
Resilience in the face of unprecedented growth in digital and technological development requires adaptation. Achieving resilience needs a collective effort across people, technology and organisations. From components to systems, through to the emergent properties of systems of systems, we live in a complex, unpredictable world. However, this complexity also allows us as a society to create a pool of options from which to identify innovations that support critical national infrastructure.
For society’s benefit, today and tomorrow, it’s important that we work together on transport, both rail specific operational technology, and the broader technology developments, enabling our digital infrastructure. It’s the nature of our transport challenge that creates the need to hit an ever-moving cyber security target. Supporting this, a supply chain of specialist providers through to system integrators develop, launch, and adapt products. But no supply chain is uniquely sector specific. And no product to deliver hardware security for transport can be developed without broader consideration of factors, such as the investment needed to support these enabling technologies, and the talent pipeline of people and companies that create them.
So, where can partnerships between academia and industry, government and VCs deliver the best value and greatest impact in helping secure this open and resilient digital present, (and future) for transport? How can national and international organisations, government agencies, and NGOs, who collectively shape priorities and resource funding and networks, provide the best foundational framework? How can you sustain the growth curve, bridge the inevitable gaps, and step changes in product development, whilst also sustaining partnerships for the benefit of all, meeting your client, supplier and partner needs? What impact is RazorSecure having now in this ecosystem, and where - as we scale-up further - will we be modelling the way in the next few years?
RazorSecure’s experience as a VC-funded scale-up gives us perspective on how to sustain partnerships. Having delivered operational cyber security and digital maintenance across a rapidly increasing range of geographies, diversifying rolling stock designs, and all whilst doubling in size as a company; we’ve gained hands-on experience of how to sustain these partnerships through complex and unpredictable change. What we do and deliver supports cyber security in transport whilst helping to build industry confidence in making long-term investment in transport solutions, most recently with our Digital Maintenance Gateway, and our government-funded industry-academia research and long-term commitment to a university partnership.
Working with our VCs, customers, and partners allows us to focus our intellectual capital energy on the right design changes and the most important operational challenges. Every train’s network infrastructure and system exposure is unique, each rolling stock unit is exposed to different maintenance schedules, passenger interactions, and journeys mapped out across different terrain and tracks. This is occurring alongside a rapidly complexifying network, greater IT and OT interaction, regulatory scrutiny from all directions, changing legislation…the list goes on. Ensuring the security of our hardware - and that of our customers as they implement Digital Maintenance - is one of our major contributions to the transport industry.
The challenge set at this year’s CYBERUK is securing an open and resilient digital future. We cannot predict the future or say with clarity what cyberspace will look like in ten years’ time, although it is clear that the gap is growing in terms of both attacker and defender capabilities, and cybersecurity roles and the availability of skilled people. But, using our unique characteristics, our expertise, our products and our ways of working, RazorSecure will play our part in innovating and building the technologies, and nurturing and growing expertise. We will continue working to predict and mitigate transport risks and vulnerabilities so that we, and the transport network, are resilient to the threats of 2023 and through to 2033.
RazorSecure would like to thank the team at Connected Places Catapult and the UK Department of Transport Research and Innovation Grant funding programme. Our commercial partners have played a key role in the development of our Digital Maintenance Gateway solution, along with the University of Birmingham's BCRRE contribution to our DfT TRIG Digital Maintenance project, completed 2022.