UK security strategy draws on growing expertise across Whitehall

The UK's soon-to-be-released cyber security strategy includes input from policy makers across government, says Nigel Harrison of the Office of Cyber Security and Information Assurance (OCSIA).

"In the past year, government has been focused on developing expertise in policy makers across government in cyber matters," he told a Cyber Security Challenge roundtable on security careers.

As a result, he said, the government has a core of people who understand cyber security issues, which is helping to support government plans to move to cloud computing to stop the expensive way the public sector implements IT.

"As we have developed this expertise, there have been an increasing number of contributions from across government on the national approach to cyber security," said Harrison.

The moving goal of including all views is one of the reasons for the delay in publishing the cyber security strategy, but he confirmed it was on schedule to be released within a month.

Last week, Owen Pengelly, deputy director of policy at the Office for Cyber Security and Information Assurance in the Cabinet Office, said he expected the strategy to be out in mid-November.

He also told a Trusted Computing seminar in London that the strategy is aimed at enabling the UK to reap the huge economic and social value of a resilient and secure cyber space by 2015.

The key elements of the strategy are: making the public safe online and ensuring the UK is a good place to do business online; making the UK more resilient to cyber attack and better able to protect its interests; ensuring the UK can help shape an open, secure and vibrant cyber space; and building UK knowledge, skills and capability to underpin these objectives.