Cyber

Call for innovators

by Mark Rowe

The London Office for Rapid Cybersecurity Advancement (LORCA) has made the open call for its third cohort of cyber innovators. The new cohort will be tasked with solving pressing cybersecurity issues, as identified at LORCA’s Innovation Forum. See details of the application process and the challenges at lorca.co.uk/apply. LORCA is one of two cyber innovation centres as part of the UK’s official National Cyber Security Strategy.

Security by Design was selected as one pressing challenge. As people use more technology in their lives, there’s a growing need for products that are secure through their design to make it easier for people and businesses to remain safe online. LORCA seeks cyber security solutions that make it cheaper or easier for products to be made secure. This includes ensuring products are secure as standard, rather than requiring an add-on solution, and at code level, as this remains a challenge across the sector.

The second challenge revolves around the concept of Basics. While the cyber security market is saturated with products and solutions, even in mature sectors like financial services – there remains a demand to get the basics right. LORCA’s Innovation Forum identified a need for cyber patching and vulnerability management to deal with gaps in security. It’s also looking for cyber scale-ups that can add to fundamental security controls with accurate and automated regulation and compliance metrics.

The third challenge is ‘Beyond’; to support new approaches that go beyond current offerings.

Those accepted onto the LORCA programme will receive a year of bespoke support to engineer and iterate their solution and scale their businesses quickly – all within a dedicated space at LORCA’s base at the hub Plexal, at Here East on the former Olympics site in Stratford. Participating companies will receive one-to-one commercial and technical support from Deloitte’s Cyber Risk Service team and academic and engineering support by the Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT) at Queen’s University Belfast. Plexal’s innovation services team can help the businesses develop their business, iterate their products and scale in the UK or globally.

Members of cohort three can engage with industry so cyber solutions are a fit for what the market needs. For example, members of LORCA’s first and second cohorts have recently joined insurance companies as part of a Needs Accelerator roundtable, which allows discussions around a specific industry’s biggest cyber challenges.

Lydia Ragoonanan, director of LORCA, pictured, said: “Having already seen how many talented and inventive cybersecurity innovators there are in the country with our first two cohorts, we’re really looking forward to seeing what great ideas emerge now. As the UK’s dedicated space for industry-led cybersecurity innovation, it’s vital we’re always moving the conversation on to make sure we’re creating genuinely useful solutions to the problems impacting industry most.”

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