The telecommunications infrastructure continues to become more embedded in our current way of life, which brings with it potential fragility and vulnerability to a number of hazards, including the possibility of co-ordinated cyber attacks. This may lead to the threat of severe degradation or even failure of key HMG functions and the critical national infrastructure (CNI) as they come to rely more and more on standard commercial networks.
The key objective is the continued availability of the required communications functions for use by the identified in-scope services in the event of a failure within the commercial telecommunications networks, for whatever reason. Further work needs to be completed to consider what gap needs to be closed and what options exist. By the end of 2009/10, we will have identified the options and developed a business case for implementation.
Ooh, they’ve invented a new unnecessary initialism.
Other than that, these two paragraphs say nothing.
What they should say is: “government networks are not secure. They should be”.
“Further work needs to be completed to consider what gap needs to be closed and what options exist. By the end of 2009/10, we will have identified the options and developed a business case for implementation.”
Translation = “we have found a way to spend more money now let’s prove we need it”
Too, Complex Delegate Subnets.
This says very little about building more secure systems, shows little understanding of what is involved in doing so and why it is important. Even the best systems are vunerable to mistakes by departmental staff and will continue to cause data leaks.
There is massive scope for real time highly available government services – enabled by open source and off the shelf software. BUT, Government must decide that the public owns the information Whitehall holds about citizens and the public should have access to it subject to the obvious restrictions.
It about trust and devolving power and information to people, computers are just a tool to enable it if the political will is there.
Regards.
Cllr Sean Lever.
Why dont you go the full Dr Strangelove mile and make plans for the elite to retreat into mines taking females selected specially for their breeding ability?
Look, when people mess with our telecoms infrastructure its a problem for everyone, not just spooks and bossy people in Whitehall. So the net and phone system should be robust for all, and designed to continue to be there for people in a crisis. eg after something like 7/7 people need at the very least to be able to send txt messages.
Another thought – let’s avoid using the passive tense altogether. Follow Gowers.
Can you name three instances when something set out in the passive tense in a strategy/green/white paper actually happened?
The relentless pursuit by telcos to off-shore development of telecoms infrastructure software components to disparate supplier companies in different countries (eg China, India, Eastern Europe) will make this goal very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.
The UK should be maintaining tight control of its vital infrastructure software and that means keeping the source code within the UK; designing it, developing it and maintaining it using UK nationals just as we would with defence software.