The Executive Directors of four key European agencies dealing with security and defence - the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA), Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), the EU institutions’ permanent Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-EU) and the European Defence Agency (EDA) - met today (23 November) at the EDA premises to identify and discuss cooperative opportunities in the field of cyber security and defence.
In his opening remarks, EDA Chief Executive Jorge Domecq recalled that the 2014 EU Cyber Defence Policy Framework, adopted by the Foreign Affairs Council in November 2014, explicitly encouraged the four agencies to enhance their cooperation in a number of areas, for instance to develop common cyber security and defence competence profiles based on international best practices and certification used by EU Institutions, to work on public sector cyber security and defence organisational and technical standards for use in the defence and security sector and to develop a working mechanism to exchange best practice on exercises, training and other areas of possible civilian-military synergy.
“In the spirit of the EU Global Strategy and its implementation plan on security and defence, EU entities need to think cross-sectoral. We need to joint forces where appropriate in order to anticipate the security challenges and adapt to Member States’ expectations. And nowhere does this better apply than in the Cyber domain”, Mr Domecq stated.
Task force
The aim of the meeting was not yet to agree on a list of concrete projects to work on but to brainstorm and discuss possible options for future cooperation.
A joint task force was set up to further discuss first initial ideas exchanged at today’s meeting; it will report back by spring 2017 with an in-depth assessment and concrete recommendations for cooperation projects.
The next Executive Directors’ meeting of the four agencies is scheduled for May or June 2017.
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