ENISA reports on Europe’s telecommunications infrastructure resilience
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- Published: Wednesday, 02 March 2016 12:40
A recent ENISA report has looked at resilience and security in the EU telecoms sector, focusing in particular on the mandatory incident reporting scheme.
The report states that; “The first mandatory, EU-wide incident reporting scheme, aimed at ensuring the security and integrity of EU telecommunication networks and services, turned out to be an unparalleled success.” It has contributed to strengthening the resilience and services availability of the European telecoms infrastructure all across the EU.
The EU incident reporting activities have been developing for four years now, with an annual growth rate of 25-30 percent in the number of incidents. The consolidated impact evaluation done by ENISA, to measure performance in this period, has brought to light some important findings. These include:
- System failures (66 percent, e.g. software bugs and hardware failures) along with human errors (20 percent, e.g. cable cuts) are the top root causes disrupting EU telecommunications infrastructures, and ENISA will concentrate upon those in future studies.
- Third party failures have recorded an increase since last year and continue to represent an important cause for disruptions (16 percent of all incidents in 2014, 11 percent in 2013), asking for further developments in areas like supply chain security.
Prof. Dr Udo Helmbrecht, Executive Director of ENISA, commented: “Achieving resilience in the EU telecom sector is one of the main building blocks of a strong digital society. ENISA will continue supporting developments in this area and deploy its expertise in the implementation of similar requirements of the NIS Directive in other sectors.”
Read the report.
