Britain’s infrastructure needs shared intelligence, validated risks and coordinated resilience
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
The prospect of bringing more of Britain's critical national infrastructure into public ownership has prompted plenty of debate about investment, governance and accountability.
Far less attention has been paid to what it could mean for cybersecurity.
Regardless of where you stand politically, one thing is clear. Public ownership does not make cyber risk disappear.
If anything, it raises expectations that essential services will be more resilient, more coordinated and better prepared to withstand disruption.
That expectation reflects the reality of the threat landscape. Energy providers, water companies, transport operators and healthcare organizations all sit at the center of complex digital ecosystems. Their ability to deliver essential services depends on thousands of suppliers, technology vendors and third parties.
When one organization is compromised, the effects can spread well beyond its own network. Resilience therefore depends on far more than protecting individual organizations. It depends on understanding and managing the relationships between them.
If the government is serious about strengthening national infrastructure, cybersecurity must become part of that conversation from day one. That means moving beyond isolated security programs and towards a model where organizations share intelligence, understand common risks and coordinate their response before disruption spreads.
Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!
Some of the defining cyber attacks of recent years have demonstrated that attackers are rarely interested in a single target. They look for opportunities to compromise one organization in order to reach many others.
The SolarWinds attack remains one of the clearest examples. By compromising trusted software updates, attackers gained access to thousands of organizations around the world. More recently, the ransomware attack on Synnovis disrupted pathology services across several NHS trusts, leading to cancelled operations, delayed appointments and widespread disruption to patient care.
Neither incident remained confined to the organization that was initially compromised. Both exposed the reality that critical infrastructure now depends on interconnected supply chains as much as physical assets.
That presents a challenge for every operator of critical national infrastructure. Security can no longer be viewed solely through the lens of protecting your own estate. Organizations also need visibility into the threats affecting suppliers, partners and the wider ecosystem. A vulnerability within a software provider or outsourced service can quickly become a problem for every organization that depends on it.
This is where many existing security programs begin to show their limitations. Organizations have invested heavily in detection technologies, vulnerability management platforms and threat intelligence feeds. They are collecting more information than ever before. Yet many still struggle to translate that information into confident operational decisions.
