What do you need to do?
This year, entrants are asked to produce an essay and submit electronically on the following topic:
Effective emergency preparedness: safeguarding ICT systems and infrastructure from disruption
Communications networks are treated as a critical national infrastructure because of the key role they play (increasingly) in daily life but also as a means of communicating in times of emergency. For example the international reaction to last September’s Red Sea cable cuts or the devastation caused to communications by natural disasters such as Storm Melissa in Jamaica.
The ability to prepare for, and withstand, interruptions to communications networks, or network resilience, is defined by the ITU as ‘The ability to provide and maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of faults and challenges to normal operation of a given communication network, based on prepared facilities’.
In this year’s essay we would like you to concentrate on two principal policy areas that define ‘network resilience’:
- the protection of infrastructure (undersea and telecommunications) including data centres and
- diversification within the telecommunications supply chain.
Do you find the current policies designed to protect national and international communications systems from disruption to be sufficient? Is anything more needed – why and how might it be achieved?
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