FOREWORD
FOREWORD By Ian Fletcher
T
he inaugural issue of Critical Infrastructure Protection Review comes at an important time. Recent months have seen a growing awareness of three convergent trends which are sharpening the challenges facing those of us charged with identifying and protecting against the risks and threats facing critical infrastructure around the world. The first of these is the growing awareness of the threat to infrastructure from natural hazards, as weather events grow more extreme, and affect especially the low lying and coastal areas where a large portion of the world’s population lives. The second trend has been convergence among systems, often using the internet as the backbone for system integration, remote management and a kind of operator disintermediation – for example, taking drivers out of cars and miners out of mines, courtesy of as combination of remote control, automation and artificial intelligence. It’s happening in transport, in many services, now retailing, and may extend even to food production in future. The internet and the data ecology and economy it supports is becoming the single ‘system of systems’, providing vital linkages, feedback and control to other, critical infrastructures. 6
Critical Infrastructure Protection Review - Autumn 2017
The third trend is the realisation at a social and political level that these risks are serious, and may well be beyond governments alone to manage. Much of this realisation is focused on cyber and data risks, where ordinary people find themselves exposed, and where governments may be especially ill-equipped to respond effectively. Helpfully, one of the papers in this issue of Critical Infrastructure Protection Review looks at the way public-private partnership arrangements can be organised to help manage risks. It’s an important contribution. There is a human dimension to all this too. I urge you to read the paper in this edition on security provision at Barnsley NHS Hospital for a genuinely moving insight to the human frailties and needs that often depend on critical infrastructures to survive and to thrive. This is an important lesson: protecting critical infrastructures is an intellectually demanding and conceptually challenging task, but it is ultimately a human story, where ordinary people’s needs, and aspirations depend on the systems we describe as critical. The papers in this edition each makes an important, and – taken overall - a balanced contribution to the painstaking task of mapping the way critical infrastructures operate, interact,