Dear all,
Welcome to 2025 and what I think is the fourth year of existence for our community that now consists of 26 cities and 10 regions in 18 EU member states representing more than 10 million EU citizens. Two national ISACs continue to grow as well and we look forward to enabling more. We continue on our journey to bring to life:
- Our Vision to create a critical mass of cities pro-actively collaborating in sharing sensitive personal information on cyber safety more rapidly, more widely and more intensively than is currently the case.
- Our Mission to significantly reduce the probability and impact of cyber-attacks on public city administrations in Europe.
- Our Goal to support the more effective and sustainable implementation of secure digital solutions for our citizens.
Thank you for all the wonderful contributions and encouragement in the past year as we worked to mature along the lines of https://tools.enisa.europa.eu/topics/national-cyber-security-strategies/information-sharing/isacs-toolkit/view. Some great activities we can look back to, especially the VAUBAN interactive cyber simulation “The Battle for the Golden Ticket” in March, the PHALANX” – 2024 Multi-ISAC Tabletop at ENISA in October, the successful launch of the ISAC Baseline project (see https://isac4cities.eu/public-administration-isac-baseline), regular joint-webinars with our friends at ECSO (see https://ecs-org.eu/)., and of course our continued support of the EU Council of ISACs and ENISA.
In 2025 our focus will very much be on expanding what is working, i.e. encouraging those “missing” EU member states to join, the ISAC Baseline project to include members from all EU member states, our cooperation with our friends at ECSO (see https://ecs-org.eu/) and ENISA, plus our support of the EU Council of ISACs. We have no immediate plans for the next tabletop, although I do think it would be worth running PHALANX in a virtual form – stay tuned.
As NIS2 is operationalised on national levels we will also explore how to best support you in addressing the challenges raised. While the ISAC Baseline provides a solid start to this, i.e., using benchlearning to discover how others have mastered diverse line items effectively, pragmatically and rapidly, our ISAC can also provide resources to support – expert resources AND general resources to free up your own experts to do more valuable work. Do feel free to reach out with ideas.
Reflecting on 2024 for our community, my most significant insight is that individually and together we not only struggle to understand what personal knowledge might be valuable to others, and should we know, we struggle to communicate that in a way that our peers are able to extract value from it. A simple example might be a colleague who co-located vendor engineers into their spaces and benefited from faster local response speed and quality – valuable for others? Don´t know but think so. Are others able to extract value? Not sure – major https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias event occured…. But on the other hand, I learned informally that a colleague is thinking about exploring this (but not talking about it). Exam question – how can we encourage our colleagues to experiment with new ideas?
We are restarting our Friday calls next week Friday 10 January from 9 am to 10 am CET – let me know if I should resend the invite to you?
So here’s wishing you all the best and remember the ISAC services offered (see https://isac4cities.eu/services-offered) – all revenue flows into accelerating our maturity journey and hence increases the value you can draw from the community.
Note that we will be working to improve visibility and benefits of https://www.linkedin.com/company/eu-city-information-sharing-and-analysis-center-isac/?viewAsMember=true and https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12773643/ – so please do follow / join in case you have not.
Cheers
Oliver
Innovating our Future… Together
Chair City ISAC I4C+ / Dr. Oliver Schwabe. Email: oliver.schwabe@isac4cities.eu Mobile: +49 (0) 1709053671. Web: