SUNRISE to protect European infrastructure from catastrophes
Including climate change and resource scarcity
Multinational IT services firm Atos is leading a group of 41 public and private entities on the SUNRISE project, which aims to create measures to strengthen the resilience of critical infrastructure (CI) against the impact of catastrophic events in Europe.
The EU commissioned the SUNRISE project as part of the Horizon Europe Program, with the goal of ensuring the highest availability, reliability and continuity of vital infrastructure (like energy, transport, water and health) in the event of disasters, including future pandemics, resource scarcity and climate change.
The SUNRISE consortium comprises 18 public and private CI operators and authorities, and has received €11 million in funding from Horizon.
One of SUNRISE's goals is to encourage active cooperation among CI providers inside and beyond European borders; between various sectors; and between public and commercial stakeholders.
The project will determine their specific requirements and provide technology solutions to meet them.
Additionally, it will include pandemic-specific essential services and CI in Europe, as well as their linkages and dependencies, an evaluation of their risks and cascading consequences, and effective European-level responses.
The range of the organisations taking part in SUNRISE will help researchers to fully understand the unique risks facing each EU nation.
In addition to organising the project and providing technology, Atos says it will take part in the study of CI services and the building of SUNRISE tools, with an emphasis on cyber-physical resilience and remote inspection of these assets.
This would include offering a threat intelligence solution and conducting dynamic risk assessment using visual anomaly detection, 3D model development, and UAV inspection.
Atos will also oversee the coordination, administration, quality assurance and risk management of the whole project, in addition to taking part in the dissemination and business plan.
SUNRISE's coordinator Antonio Lvarez, from the Cybersecurity Unit of ARI at Atos in Iberia, explained during the project's presentation at the Polytechnic University of Madrid that while CI is very important for society, service providers and European authorities are not yet well-prepared to handle risks that test them.
The SUNRISE project's research is 'moving forward quickly', says Atos, and the partners have held a number of seminars for CI operators in Slovenia, Italy and Spain.
In turn, this has helped them amass first-hand information crucial to the project's development.
The research's findings are set to be tested in 18 facilities across eight countries.
While Atos is currently coordinating the SUNRISE project, the company is also going through a difficult reorganisation that intends to split off its security, big data and digital operations into a new company to be traded on the Paris stock exchange.
Earlier this month, it emerged that the UK government has paid Atos £24 million in an out-of-court settlement, following a legal challenge the company filed over an £850 million contract given to Microsoft to develop a weather supercomputer to be used by the UK's Met Office.
In its complaint, Atos said that the UK government incorrectly rejected the Atos bid as non-compliant.
The contract was awarded to Microsoft in February 2021.