The EU invests large amounts of money in cybersecurity as this topic is becoming increasingly important. These investments lead to several research and development actions, which could potentially be useful for the FORESIGHT project. To enlarge the existing FORESIGHT ecosystem, the European cybersecurity landscape should be clustered to reuse available knowledge, distribution channels and other resources.

Computer systems become more and more important as they are used within our society and the business world. This is due to initiatives such as digitalisation and industry 4.0. Simultaneously, cyberattacks on those systems are steadily increasing. Depending on the domain (aviation, energy and naval sector), the cyberattack can have a serious impact. If a cyberattack succeeds in shutting down an energy grid, for example, an entire city may be affected and without electricity. If additional infrastructures such as hospitals are affected, the damage cannot be foreseen.

As a result of the increasing number of cyberattacks and the considerable damages they may cause, the EU declared cybersecurity a central element of its research and development strategy. Major investments are made in this sector, the FORESIGHT project being an example of EU counter-initiatives in the fight against cyberattacks.  Besides the FORESIGHT project, there are several other projects and initiatives within the EU that aim to fight, detect or prevent cyberattacks.

The common goals and interests of the different projects and initiatives recommend to pool existing resources and insights to support the EU strategy. In this context, one of the expected impacts of the FORESIGHT project is to improve and strengthen the possibilities for cooperation between existing cyber sectors and pan-European initiatives. In order to reach this objective, a novel federated cyber training environment architecture that includes many decentralised, distributed platforms is being developed. The deployment of these capabilities is planned in such way that any user or partner of the proposed federated cyber-range environment can easily contribute. Also, the contributors can link their cyber-range resources or related resources to complement the required training capabilities or available resources.

Within the FORESIGHT consortium, several partners are already working on related cybersecurity projects such as awareness-raising training programmes. These existing connections can be used to exchange knowledge and tackle new, difficult problems that would otherwise require extensive research.

Focus objectives of the synergic process to enlarge the FORESIGHT ecosystem

The aim of the ecosystem enlargement is to keep the FORESIGHT project and its platform running after the end of the project to keep the results as sustainable as possible. As already mentioned, the ecosystem will also be expanded with the help of related projects to achieve the highest possible benefit. Therefore, the synergy processes focus on the following key points:

• Use results from previous projects
• Make maximum use of the experiences gained in the past
• Make connections and ensure regular exchange with the partners of ongoing projects
• Disseminate the FORESIGHT results to a broader audience through the partners
• Identify what kind of collaboration could support the results of the FORESIGHT project

Activities to increase the reach of the FORESIGHT project

Derived from the focus objectives, several activities are in progress to enlarge the FORESIGHT ecosystem and will lead to a broader reach of the project results as well as a sustainable overall impact of the FORESIGHT platform:

• Creating a potential partner landscape with related projects and initiatives to envision synergies
• Introducing the Cyber-Range Network, a collaboration between the projects CYBER-MAR (Cyber preparedness actions for a holistic approach and awareness raising in the MARitime logistics supply chain), SPIDER (a cyberSecurity Platform for vIrtualiseD 5G cybEr Range services) and FORESIGHT
• Implementing a joint webinar event organised by the Cyber-Range Network
• Using communication channels to present clustering activities