WARP Newsletter 8 - July 2007

WARPLOG Issue 8 | July 2007.

Welcome to this Summer Holiday Beach Reading edition of the Newsletter

Having recovered from the very successful Annual Forum, we are in a quiet period in anticipation of a decision soon on the future of the WARP Trust plans – see below.

There are exciting developments just below the surface in both Education and Health, and plans for several more imaginative WARP developments, but all not quite yet ready to be exposed publicly.

New WARPs

We are very pleased to be able to announce our first official WARP overseas. Many of you will have met Hiroko and her colleagues at the Annual Forum, and we were delighted to approve the Application for the Hitachi WARP HIWARP soon after, so you will see their details on the WARP Register of course, though they are not quite operational yet. This will be linked to the very prestigious Hitachi Incident Reporting Team’s HIRT, and could pave the way for an extensive corporate network if its pilot phase is successful There has been further interest from various agencies in Japan, so this could herald a new community of WARPs emerging, and they will be very pleased to build links with WARPs in the UK and elsewhere. The Netherlands are conducting a trial programme as well of course, and we hope to hear news of that soon, probably at the Govcert.nl conference scheduled for October this year. We are very pleased to welcome the SWWARP for local government in the South West region at last, with thanks to Pam and Mark for their work on this.

‘UNIRAS’ advisories   

Many of you will have noticed some changes to the old ‘Uniras’ feeds over the last few months, as the new CPNI organisation develops.

First of all, there is no UNIRAS any more!

The CPNI CERT is now called CSIRTUK, and continues to issue advisories and warnings likely to be of relevance to the UK’s CNI, which is CPNI’s responsibility. CSIRTUK is working closely with the new GOVCERTUK run by CESG, which has picked up Uniras’ former responsibilities for the government and public sectors. We are in discussions with CESG about exactly what that will mean for WARPs across the public sector, and hope to be able to provide more details of that soon. Meanwhile CSIRTUK’s advisory and warning service has just begun to be issued in RSS format on the CPNI website, and eventually the email service will be discontinued. If you are counting on these feeds, don’t worry, as we are producing a fully structured xml-based version of these advisories and warnings which will be available as a special feed for those WARPs who want it, including the WARP Trust of course. More details to follow soon.

WARP Trust

I would like to thank all those who have provided comment and input to the WARP Trust business plan. Your help is very much appreciated and I am pleased to say the first draft of the business plan was reviewed by the ‘Network Security Innovation Platform’ (NSIP) manager in July. The team are now putting the finishing touches before formal issue to the review board which will be meeting mid September. If we are given the go ahead at this meeting we will enter the start-up phase were the WARP Trust entity is created as a not-for-profit company and a CEO is recruited who will be responsible for the success of the WARP Trust and accountable to the WARP Trust board.

The two critical success factors highlighted in the business plan are:

• The New Software Suite delivering centralised services will drive down costs and reduce start-up time for WARP operators.
• Focused effort on a few chosen sectors to maximise take-up and reduce the time to achieve commercial sustainability

This start up phase will also involve managing the tender process for the new WARP Trust software suite with the contract being awarded in January 2008. The WARP Trust will also be formally launched around this time and will be offering an interim centralised content feed service, based on the current Filtered Warnings Application software. The centralised service will provide the WARP operator infrastructure at the lowest possible cost, thereby freeing up the WARP operator to focus on building and adding value to their community. The WARP Trust funding model is based on subscriptions with grant funding and sponsorship in the early years until it can break even. It is hoped that existing WARP operators will work closely with the WARP Trust to address these key sectors as the break-even target is to create over 50 new WARPs within the next 3 years.

There will be a long-awaited emphasis on branding and marketing featuring highly in the WARP Trust business plan and there are some exciting opportunities which the WARP Trust could pursue. The initial sector emphasis will not detract from the continued encouragement to establish WARPs in any and all sectors where there is a need. The Trust will also be there for all WARPs regardless of whether they subscribe to the new software and content services, and will be governed by a board including the key government departments and existing WARP representatives.

WOF

The WARP Operators Forum has just chosen its third chair, Tony Proctor of Wolverhampton University who runs the WMWARPs, and we are very grateful to him for volunteering and already getting things off to a good start. Many thanks are also due to Bob Askwith who did a sterling job as chair for the last year, despite several other ‘day-jobs’. The next WOF meeting is scheduled to be in Slough in September, generously hosted by Anite, and all registered WARPs are invited of course, and those in the throes of developing their own WARPs. Please contact Tony if you’d like to know more (contact details on the Register of course).

I will let you know the outcome of the WARPs Trust review towards the end of September. Enjoy the break, wherever you are.

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Thanks

PeterB