- The initiative will increase Europe’s capacity against cyber threats
- Aims to stimulate innovation among small businesses, start-ups
- Cybersecurity centre to be located in Bucharest, Romania
Plans to reinforce Europe’s preparedness and resilience against cyber attacks by creating a pool for innovation and expertise were adopted by Parliament on Wednesday.
The new cybersecurity competence centre, to be based in Bucharest, will pool expertise in cybersecurity research and bring together the European cybersecurity competence community. It will also provide financial support from the Horizon Europe and Digital Europe programmes to innovative projects from start-ups and SMEs.
The legislation adopted on Wednesday aims to stimulate the European cybersecurity technological and industrial ecosystem to coordinate and pool relevant resources in the EU. It builds from the contractual Public Private Partnership on cybersecurity created in 2016.
The initiative will be supported by the Digital Europe and Horizon Europe programmes, under the 2021-2027 multiannual financial framework.
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“Especially in times when so much of our daily activities are taking place online, it becomes all the more important that we ensure high levels of innovation in the area of cybersecurity” said lead MEP Rasmus Andresen (Greens/EFA, DE). This new structure will ensure that all the valuable expertise that exists all across Europe – be it in research institutions, small businesses, start-ups, NGOs and the open-source community – are all included in the process of deciding European research priorities. At the same time we bring all the Member states to the table to collectively invest more in this crucial sector and pool our resources” M. Andresen said.
Background
On 13 September 2017, the Commission adopted a cybersecurity package with a series of initiatives to further improve EU cyber-resilience, deterrence and defence. A year later, the Commission presented a proposal for the creation of a European cybersecurity competence centre with a related network of national coordination centres. The initiative aims to improve and strengthen the EU’s cybersecurity capacity, by stimulating the European technological and industrial cybersecurity ecosystem as well as coordinating and pooling necessary resources in Europe.
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