New technologies such as Cloud Computing, Big Data, Internet of Things as well as the increasing connectedness through smartphones and social media lead to new threat scenarios. The goal of the roadmap is to identify risks caused by new technological developments and address them by suggesting where to focus research funding.

Roadmap for ICT security

The approach to dealing with security in ICT (information and communications technology) systems is mostly reactionary. Increasing digitalisation demands a different approach - potential scenarios have to be determined in early phases of research and development. The roadmap is a first step towards a structured approach. Based on (international) developments, researchers determined which challenges regarding ICT security arise in the relevant areas of “law, society, trust”, “system security” and “reliability of systems”. The complexity of this interdisciplinary question was reflected in the composition of the consortium.

Based on the results the relevance of technology research in Austria was assessed. A variety of methods, such as expert interviews, surveys and workshops, were used to validate the theoretically acquired findings. The combined results were then used for the creation of the actual roadmap and categorised as short-term, medium-term or long-term.

Source: BEST AT project homepage