Wide-Area Situational Awareness for Critical Infrastructure Protection
The article “Businesses Take Cyber Security Seriously” has recently been published by the THE INSTITUTE, the member newspaper of the IEEE, in order to highlight the relevance of protecting information systems against cyber-threats. The vast majority of these systems are integrated inside critical infrastructures to manage their services themselves, such as banks, energy systems, control systems, etc. The article also stresses some interesting cyber-defense solutions which have recently been published in the IEEE Computer Magazine, and among them, our paper “Wide-Area Situational Awareness (WASA) methodological framework for critical infrastructure protection“.
This work exposes that despite successive attempts to protect critical infrastructures against incidents and malicious threats by using traditional situational awareness solutions, the complex and critical nature of these infrastructures makes this adaptation difficult. For this reason, experts are reconsidering the topic of Wide-Area Situational Awareness (WASA) to provide monitoring of performance at all times from anywhere while ensuring dynamic prevention and response services. Given the novelty of this new research field, a WASA methodological framework together with a set of requirements for awareness construction is proposed in order to help in the development and commissioning of future WASA defense solutions.