It’s our Cyber Cluster Manager Ciara’s latest blog, providing a summary of recent activity within the cluster and some of the new events and opportunities that are coming your way.
This month we are really seeing the ramp-up of in-person events and I spent a wonderful couple of days at the inaugural National Cyber Security Show at the NEC in Birmingham, representing UKC3 and raising awareness of the great work that the cyber clusters do throughout the UK.
With COP26 nearing, ScotlandIS Cyber ran an event on ‘Cyber meets Sustainability’ where we discussed how companies can go green securely. It really brought home for me what a vital role that the cyber community can play in helping their customers reduce their carbon footprint by having a cloud-first mentality that is both secure by design and green-focussed. Security compliancy risk concerns are known to be one of the main reasons that companies are not embracing cloud in the way they could be, and with many benefits such as lower costs, higher resilience and now a drive towards a lower carbon footprint there is really no reason not to embrace the cloud.
And the cyber community plays a key role in helping their customers on that journey through education and awareness but also by providing those much-needed cloud security skills that many organisations lack. Certainty of where data is stored and transferred to is of course tied in with that compliancy concern and there is often a misunderstanding that businesses cannot control where their data is stored in the cloud, however with most cloud providers there is an option (which would need to be selected and paid for) to control which data centre locations that your data resides in. Again it will be through education and learning that we can support businesses to move their in-house infrastructure to a cloud-based one.
At our event, we heard some fascinating insights and scary stats from Freha Arshad of Accenture, and James King of Host in Scotland. We also heard from a completely different angle from Vicky Brock, CEO of VistalWorks, on how consumers lack of concern for who they may be buying from (often resulting in counterfeit or fake goods being bought by mistake) is fuelling an environmental impact as we order goods from China and other foreign countries that could be purchased locally at a slightly higher price. A simple step we can all take to be more informed and reduce our own carbon footprints at the same time.
And lastly, I wanted to highlight Cyber Runway – this is a new DCMS-backed programme that is replacing HutZero, Cyber Bootcamp 101 and Technation Cyber.
It is open for registration of interest now and this closes on 26th September for Launch (Hutzero equivalent), and on 4th October for Grow and Scale programmes. We are expecting there to be in-person sessions run in Scotland as part of Cyber Runway, so we are really keen to have a good representation from Scotland participating. Do get in touch if you would like to know more and we can put you in touch directly with the Plexal team who are running the programme as well.
In parallel with Cyber Runway, ScotlandIS Cyber will be running some events focussed on Scottish cyber start-ups to provide a chance for networking, and with insights and talks geared at supporting your journey. We will also be building more insights into who the cyber start-ups are in Scotland – if you would like to be involved or to know more please do get in touch.
I hope to see many of you at an in-person event soon, I enjoy the networking and opportunities that this return to normality brings.
Our door is always open so do get in touch if you would like to know more about anything covered above or the cyber clusters in general – ciara.mitchell@scotlandis.com
For those interested in knowing more about Scotland’s Climate Tech sector,
ScotlandIS has a Climate Tech hub on the website which you can visit here.