News Item

Step Towards Foresight on Emerging Cybersecurity Challenges

The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity releases its first report on foresight in order to improve cybersecurity resilience and support the planning of its work.

Published on November 22, 2021

ENISA kicks off a new area of work in line with its Strategy objective “Foresight on Emerging and Future Cybersecurity Challenges”.

As a key element of ENISA’s strategy, foresight increases knowledge and understanding of emerging and future challenges, thus providing a path to find solutions that address those challenges and bolster EU resilience to cybersecurity threats.

What is foresight?

Foresight is an ongoing, complex and multi-stage process allowing for a reflection on possible future grounded in the present and inviting informed decision-making, hence leading to actions appropriately tailored to the evolutions anticipated. Being both participatory and multidisciplinary, foresight makes it possible for different groups enjoying different expertise to work together and make a mental projection of the most realistic outcomes and possible futures.

In order to better identify and address emerging and future cybersecurity challenges, ENISA delivers its first study on the structured foresight framework. Although not commonly resorted to in the cybersecurity field, such approach is consistent with the work of ENISA as it will help generate trends, scenarios and perspectives on the future.

These findings were complemented by interviews with experts in the fields of foresight and cybersecurity, members of the ENISA’s Ad-Hoc Working Group on Foresight on Emerging and Future Cybersecurity Challenges.

Foresight can be an asset to the cybersecurity community. Cybersecurity often looks towards future short-term threats, yet there is a need for cybersecurity professionals and policymakers to maintain pace with attackers. Foresight is a good tool for supporting longer-term strategic thinking on how to improve the state of cybersecurity and overall resilience. ENISA is taking an important strategic step to better integrate foresight into cybersecurity practices.

The methods and tools applied in foresight and can be used from the definition of ENISA Single Programming Document to the specific output needs, starting from the strategic level and going down to the various strategic objectives crowdsourcing on the expertise of ENISA various stakeholders’ communities and issuing recommendations in terms of cybersecurity strategy, policy support, capacity building, operational cooperation and certification activities.

Target audience

This report is specifically relevant to the EU cybersecurity community at large and to ENISA’s stakeholders. It will also be of interest for: