Future of WARPs

WARPs will become endemic

This is already starting to happen with WARPs appearing wherever there is a need. This will increase. Some groups, or their ‘champions’, have found the WARP Toolbox and designed and built their WARP with little or no reference to CPNI until it was time to Register. This is how it should be, and the WARP programme has always worked to facilitate this.

WARPs should be free-standing

They need to be sustainable, often through subscription from their membership. Once they have proved their value, continue to develop and demonstrate it, they should be worth supporting. Some already exist on a charitable basis, with minimal funding and a lot of voluntary effort and goodwill.

There is a minimal and very light-touch Code of Practice for WARPs, and the Register is a means of recording those WARPs who agree to follow it. Apart from that, the governance is meant to be as unobtrusive as possible, whilst applying helpful guidance and steering in the early days. The long-term plan is that this will get lighter still as the WARP programme becomes self-sustaining and self-funding.

WARPs should be cooperative

Many WARPs will, in effect, be ‘co-operatives’, in that the individual members are pooling their expertise and resources for the good of all. This is particularly important to the incident reporting function, where the immediate benefit of sharing a report is for the rest of the community, though it is an investment to encourage them to share with you in future. Cooperation between WARPs is encouraged, as it clearly makes sense for small units to link up for mutual support.

WARPs are encouraged to cooperate through:

• the Code of Practice,
• the WARP Operators Forum,
• the peer-to-peer capability of the FWA software, and
• the use of open standards for advisory exchange.

The more WARPs there are, the more benefit this can bring to individual WARPs, through cooperation and collaboration.

Belonging to a WARP should keep your systems better protected. That reduces the chance that they will become an unwitting threat to others. That is good for everybody.

The more WARPs there are, the safer everyone will be

The strategy has been to encourage the establishment of one or two WARPs in specific sectors, so that they can prove it can be done, and can lead the way for others in that sector. A similar strategy exists for overseas WARPs – we are expecting several countries to establish their first WARPs soon, and if there is sufficient take-up, we will ‘franchise’ the WARP model to be administered by suitable agencies in each country.

We expect that some WARPs will develop links with existing CERTs, and indeed some WARPs might even evolve into CERTs at some stage. Some WARPs may be established within the hierarchy of a government department or a large corporation, or even work as ‘sub-CERTs’; others will be fiercely independent. So long as they are looking after the needs of their users, following the WARP Code of Practice, and delivering the three basic WARP services of Warning, Advice, and Reporting, then the WARP programme will support them if they care to register.

The future

The future will see the natural evolution of WARPs:

• extending their remit,
• improving their services,
• increasing their effectiveness, and
• reducing their costs further if possible.

They will need to keep moving to survive, but stay flexible and versatile enough to do so.

The future of WARPs is bright.

A list of current WARPs is described in the WARP Register.

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