Now in its sixteenth year, the CW International Conference 2025 will delve into the theme of Resilience with a strong focus on the technological aspects: exploring the resilience of business processes; strategic risk management; the robustness of underlying technologies, and the impact of technology failure. The event will examine how emerging technologies, and digital infrastructure can recover from disruptions and build safeguards for the future. Key factors driving the need for resilience will be explored, including geopolitical tensions, climate change, and the increasing interconnectedness and complexity of critical industries.

Join us at the event as Bob Oates chairs a session around Cyber Security:

Cyber Security

12.10pm – 1.10pm, 27 March 2025 ‐ 1 hour
Room: Francis Crick Auditorium
Breakout 1

Speakers:
Josie Houghton, Cyber Security Lead, Rolls-Royce SMR
Professor John A McDermid OBE, Lloyds Register Foundation Chair of Safety, Director Centre for Assuring Autonomy, University of York

Cyber security incidents can have impacts that harm the viability of an organisation, either directly through financial losses or indirectly through the loss of trust and reputational damage that comes with being known as an organisation that provides technology or services with inadequate defences. In critical industries, the rise of digitisation means that the potential impacts now include the loss of financial stability of an entire country, physical harm to the general public, or damage to the wider environment.

The modern organisation needs to adapt to new technologies, such as AI and quantum computers, that bring new threats, and actively innovate within the context of doing business in an increasingly hostile cyberspace. All this has to be achieved while ensuring that cyber security investment does not become a financial black hole.

With the stakes so high and at least partial failure feeling like an inevitability, join us as we explore how modern organisations develop the culture, technologies and processes to move beyond brittle ways of working and towards being resilient in the face of cyber-attacks.

• How can we design critical systems to be less vulnerable to attack?
• How do we keep essential services going in the presence of on-going attacks?
• How do we recover from incidents and rebuild ever more resilient systems that deliver the critical services that society needs to function?

Bob Oates

Associate Director at Cambridge Consultants | View profile

Specialist in the interaction between safety and security for operational technology, critical infrastructure, and IoT devices.