WARP Latest News (February 2007)

There are exciting changes afoot - updated 22 February 2007.

CPNI

For those who have not already seen the announememnt, NISCC has now merged with the National Security Advice Centre (NSAC), which provided advice on Physical and Personnel security, to form a new organisation, the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI). You will notice that the NISCC website has been incorporated into a brand new CPNI website (www.cpni.gov.uk). This will not mean any big changes for the WARP programme in the short term.

CPNI has been created to give a more holistic focus to NISCC’s and NSAC’s advice services, particularly to National Infrastructure organisations. This reflects the increasing trend for security issues to ignore the artificial boundaries created between Infosec, Physical and Personnel disciplines, and should help us deliver a more efficient and effective service. The WARP model is of course predicated upon the Infosec threat and IT vulnerabilities, but this development provides a new opportunity to find the best ways of adapting the model to provide a valuable service right across the protective security field.

WARP Trust

As reported recently, a significant development for the WARP programme is that we are embarking on the first stage of developing an independent ‘WARPs Trust’. A competition has been carried out to identify the most suitable contractor to take forward this work and the successful bidder is LanditD (John Harrison) working closely with Intellect (Tom Wills-Sandford). This WARP Trust project team will develop a fully worked proposal for the new Trust by mid-2007 with the aim of securing further identified funding to establish and run the Trust on a viable commercial (but non-profit-making) basis. This development phase will lead to a much more independent body managing the WARP programme, driven by its members, with continuing support from CPNI, as well as other appropriate government involvement. This is a very exciting development, and interested parties will have a chance to explore and discuss the issues at the Annual WARPs Forum in Leeds on 13 March 2007. Over the coming months a wide range of stakeholders will be consulted, including registered WARPs, government departments and potential sponsors and if you would like to take part in this consultation, please register your interest at with a subject heading of 'WARP Trust'.

WARP Forum

Sign up for the WARPs Newsletter now to ensure your invitation to the Forum. Note places are limited so early sign-up is recommended.

FWA v5.0 Release

The multi-instance version of FWA, called v5.0 has now been tested and is available for purchase by registered WARPs at the Avius site. See FWA Software section for more details of FWA v5.0. Approval has also been given to improve the funtionality of FWA v5.0 with features such as an RSS feed, PDF attachments, tree mapping in peer to peer and an authentication API to help integrate FWA with other applications. When complete, this will be released as FWA v5.1 and will be available as a free upgrade to v5.0.

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