Telecommunications service provider, Cyber security and European future

 Possible Evolution of European Society

Assuming that the Russia – Ukraine war will linger for several years without a final resolution (as Russia wants and Europe yields), the fact remains that the time for cheap Russian energy in Europe is passed. Consequently, the accelerated green transfer will disrupt European industry, energy-intensive manufacturing will vanish, and cyber-physical products and services will need to become the primary European export goods within the next five to ten years. Furthermore, Europe may compete with Asia and America with accelerated transformations in the industry (4th industrial revolution), focused science and technology investments (3D and AI-enabled engineering and design), getting rid of geographical distance (Metaverse) that constraints human collaboration, man-machine teaming that accelerates the design and manufacturing performance, open data that provides large enough models for human and machine behaviour, and with forward-looking European market (EU digital acts). On the other hand, the European future depends on fewer younger generations who can disrupt industry, economy, and finance by teaming with machines as the population ages. Finally, Europe needs more coherency to deal with energy transfer, digital transformations, total security, and protecting political and economic interests.

Figure: Digital Compass for Europe 2030 (DigitalEU)

Probable Evolution of Technology

The migration journey starting with digitisation, following digitalisation and further digital transformation, proceeds at a pace defined by knowledge, competency, cooperation, business, digital maturity, and trust. (Andrews, et al., 2018) Nevertheless the complexity, the rate of change has been unforeseeable since digitisation impacted over 50% of the world population within two decades. (UN, 2022) Currently, the world feels the impact of the following three waves of evolution in information and communications technology (ICT):

1. Wave: Mobile Internet and Platforms

• The Internet with IP protocol, WWW and Browser
• 3-4G providing mobile data connection
• Smart mobile devices
• Platforms for social behaviour and economic transactions (Kenney & Zysman, 2016)
• Big data and business analysis/intelligence

2. Wave: Cyber-physical products and services

• 5 G provides near-zero latency connections for masses of connected devices
• The Internet of Things will produce 75% of organisations' data by 2025 (Stackpole, 2022)
• Migration of algorithms and machine learning automate digitised processes and provide a variety of man-machine interfaces
• Cloud computing provides computing power for services like IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, which are easy to replicate and provide

3. Wave: Real-time networks of machines and Metaverse for humans

• Non-latency and high bandwidth access networks (Wi-Fi 6, 5G and 6G) are connected through fibre optical connections for networks able to slice capacity for immersive 8K perception for humans and real-time connections between machines.
• Quantum technology will increase computing performance, disrupt encryption, and improve the sensitivity of sensors, accurate timing, and communications bandwidth. (Johnston, 2021)
• The automated function of networked machines enables the 4th industrial revolution, autonomous transportation, and smarter cities.
• Edge computing and data-driven machine learning improve the level of machine cognition (Brown, 2022)
• Digitisation and increasing connected devices will increase the amount of data by 2025 to 175 Zettabytes. Human cognition requires machine support and smart data to identify any pattern from the amount of data. (De Goes, 2013)
• Human-machine interface migrates from screen and keyboard to 3D Metaverse. (Gartner, 2021)

Europe has already lost wave two because US and China-hosted platforms have engaged most of the social, economic, and financial transfers, prominent US-borne LEO satellite constellations will compete with terrestrial wideband access to the Internet, integrated circuits manufacturing is outsourced, and the majority of software development takes place in US, China, or India. Furthermore, China pushes its cheap infrastructure and automation packages to global markets.

Wave three still provides an opportunity for European engineering, democracy, and economy, as Europe has some advantages in science and technology (S&T) together with active innovation and entrepreneurial culture. However, Europe will benefit from this opportunity only if the transformation is faster than the more voluptuous but slower competitors. Moreover, besides strong S&T, the transformation requires a supportive environment for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that provide added value to common markets. Therefore, the European availability of capital, infrastructure, services, channels, supply chains, platforms, and cooperation networks are essential enablers.

Information Security Remains Essential for European Future

Since the disrupting transformation needs to happen faster than any previous journey on the evolutionary path, there will be several critical hurdles to overcome. Mitigating these hurdles requires a social contract based on trust within the democratic political and liberal (venture capitalism, individualism, private property) economy systems. While society and its services are digitising faster than ever, digital trust  has become a foundational enabler. Suppose people lose their trust in digital services, cyber-physical products, the information provided by authorities, digital healthcare, or smart facilities they live in. In that case, the transformation will halt, and the European opportunity to gain from the ongoing development wave will be lost.

Naturally, fast development produces mistakes and failures. Hopefully, industry and service providers will learn quick enough to keep the negative impact small and short. Nevertheless, the problem becomes more severe because the state-level competitors intentionally fragment digital trust while generating an advantage for their authoritarian style (loss of privacy, big brother control, new class society) cyber-physical services. (Fleming, 2022)

In conclusion, the inside and outside sources of security failures need to be managed better than during the previous waves of digital evolution. The fundamental ways of mitigation include, for example:

1. The digitised national critical infrastructure must be more robust and resilient against failures. In addition, the whole supply chain of components intended to create critical infrastructure needs inbuilt security (processes like SecDevSecOps) . 
2. All operators of critical infrastructure services need to have preventive, real-time monitoring, and reactive measures to manage cyber behaviour and possible violations in their area of responsibility. In addition, security operations require automated threat analysis, behaviour monitoring and reaction to incidents because human responses and persistence are insufficient.
3. The edge processing and storing of data requires distributed security policy and trust between operators and users. Therefore, data security that supports low-latency implementations becomes crucial for new services supporting green transfer, 4IR, smart cities, design & engineering and automated traffic.
4. Identity and access management in the digital realm create the foundation for trust. Notably, the exponentially rising number of connected devices will challenge average enterprises. A service provider or broker would make it easier for enterprises to improve their automation with trusted machine-to-machine transactions.
5. The security processes for development and operations take time to mature. Only at higher maturity levels will the processes systematically learn from mistakes and near-misses and improve their performance and quality. Unfortunately, SMEs do not have time to establish teams with high process maturity. Hence, they need providers or jump-start partners to accelerate their abilities.
6. Europe does not educate competent people enough to suffice for all entities to take care of their security.  Furthermore, small enterprises do not have time to establish security to meet higher digital trust. Therefore, security service providers and B-to-B cooperation are essential in building digital trust between all stakeholders.
7. A Service provider must comply with existing and emerging legislation of European Digital Markets, Data Privacy and Protection, sustainable digital infrastructure, etc. (EU, 2021) The compliance requires both in-organisation and third-party auditing, multi-country cooperation, and transparent performance indicators.

Bibliography

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Johnston, H., 2021. Quantum advantage takes a giant leap in optical and superconducting systems. Physics World, Issue October.

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Stackpole, B., 2022. The promise of edge computing comes down to data. [Online] 

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