CWIC 2025

As threats—ranging from data breaches and deepfakes to climate change and pandemics—grow in complexity, the urgency to bolster fragile supply chains, strengthen critical infrastructure, and foster cross-border cyber collaboration intensifies. These risks, if unmanaged, could disrupt socio-economic, technological, and security systems worldwide. The gap between threats and defence capabilities is widening. How do we ensure resilience remains a priority, confront these challenges effectively, and learn from the international community’s experience? Telecoms resilience and security policy is central to safeguarding our interconnected world against escalating threats like cyberattacks, geopolitical instability, and climate disasters.

Building resilience demands a multi-faceted approach, starting with clear guidance for operators and robust expectations for service continuity, particularly in the mobile sector. Cross-sector collaboration, as emphasized in the September statement on UK data infrastructure from The Minister of State for Data Protection and Telecoms, requires all stakeholders to engage and identify opportunities for joint action. Upcoming policies like the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill and the Telecom Security Act signal the government’s commitment. Globally, elevated dialogues supported by diverse panels from sectors like infrastructure and aviation can inspire coordinated responses to these challenges.

Cyber security incidents can have impacts that harm the viability of an organisation, either directly through financial losses or indirectly through the loss of trust and reputational damage that comes with being known as an organisation that provides technology or services with inadequate defences. In critical industries, the rise of digitisation means that the potential impacts now include the loss of financial stability of an entire country, physical harm to the general public, or damage to the wider environment.

The modern organisation needs to adapt to new technologies, such as AI and quantum computers, that bring new threats, and actively innovate within the context of doing business in an increasingly hostile cyberspace. All this has to be achieved while ensuring that cyber security investment does not become a financial black hole.

With the stakes so high and at least partial failure feeling like an inevitability, join us as we explore how modern organisations develop the culture, technologies and processes to move beyond brittle ways of working and towards being resilient in the face of cyber-attacks.

Join us as we ask:

• How can we design critical systems to be less vulnerable to attack?
• How do we keep essential services going in the presence of on-going attacks?
• How do we recover from incidents and rebuild ever more resilient systems that deliver the critical services that society needs to function?

We live in an uncertain future which requires us to build resilience into our physical systems which will be crucial in ensuring their ability to withstand, adapt to, and recover from disruptions, whether caused by environmental changes, system malfunctions, or external threats. Resilient systems maintain functionality even under stress, minimizing downtime and safeguarding operations.

Digital twins enhance infrastructure resilience by providing real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance, and disaster simulations to identify vulnerabilities and optimize responses. They enable early detection of issues, improve resource allocation during emergencies, and facilitate collaboration among stakeholders for informed decision-making. They also optimise operational efficiency, reduce risks, and strengthen cyber security, ensuring both physical and digital infrastructure can withstand and quickly recover from disruptions.

The digital twins and Infrastructure resilience session will look how we embrace uncertainty about the future, the need to acknowledge and respond to uncertainty and how new technologies such as digital twins can support this work.

They are out there. Trailblazing companies are generating incredible value for investors and customers. They are innovating and creating thousands of jobs. Often in quite traditional industries. They have built resilient business models. Driven by the need for a sustainable future and more robust supply chains.

Upskilling their workforces and digitising operations allows them to navigate an increasingly complex world, rapidly adapt their product set and respond quickly to changing customer needs.

What can we learn from these industry leaders? How have they built architectures integrating advanced products, platforms, people, and legacy systems? How do they capture the value in the data they create? Are the lines being blurred between the tech sector and “traditional” industries? Can leading clusters like the USA’s Titanium Economy be replicated elsewhere? Ultimately, when industries collide, great innovation is often the result.

Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) have become almost ubiquitous being integral to everything from consumer applications to critical infrastructure capabilities such as transport, communications, industry and even our financial hubs. By far the most widely used and ubiquitous technology for PNT is GNSS, but despite four separately managed global systems and two regional ones, current global instabilities and criminal activities have led to a rapid rise in jamming and spoofing incidents which at best lead to a denial of service and at worst the delivery of dangerously untrustworthy results.

This Resilient PNT track will look at the threat landscape and what is needed from PNT in current and emerging applications. We will briefly review technology innovation and developments in the field of PNT, GNSS and beyond, and point to interesting trends and developments taking place that will lead to more robust, resilient and trustworthy PNT solutions in the future.

How can emerging technologies like quantum, artificial intelligence, biometrics and blockchain contribute to the resilience and security of today’s societies and organisations? From revolutionising sectors such as healthcare, energy and finance to strengthening cyber security, these innovations will usher in a new era defined by unparalleled advances.

However, their counterpoint is that many of these innovations pose new critical risks. The World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2024 report states that almost 56% of leaders think emerging technologies will prove advantageous to cyber attackers. The report asserts that we need to shift from ‘the traditional mindset of security by design’ and to ‘adopt a resilience by design approach’. This session will feature some of the cutting-edge innovations in this space as we explore how we can make the most of these technologies whilst remaining safe.

Government can help build a foundation for resilience, guiding both public and private sectors toward systems that are robust, adaptable, and secure in the face of future challenges. It plays a significant role in the development of policies and regulations that ensure the security, reliability, and safety of critical infrastructure, including standards for data protection, cyber security, and system interoperability. These regulations ensure that technology systems are resilient to threats and able to recover quickly from disruptions.