This article first appeared in UC Advanced magazine issue #21.
Tony Long, Industry CTO – Resources, Services & TMT at Atos UK&I, suggests that the UK’s Critical National Infrastructure sectors, though highly specialised, would benefit from a unified ‘umbrella’ approach to security, collaboration and innovation, and explains how this can be achieved.
The UK’s Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) spans 13 distinct sectors, from energy and utilities, to transport, healthcare and public broadcasting. Each has its own unique challenges, regulatory frameworks and operational demands. Yet, despite these differences, there’s a growing recognition that adopting a unified ‘umbrella’ approach to securing, monitoring and managing critical national infrastructure could benefit all by improving resilience, establishing a secure baseline, fostering collaboration and driving innovation across the board.
But how? If each sector is so specialised, can a single framework really work? The answer lies in identifying shared challenges, sharing learning across sectors, and delivering scalable solutions that tackle those shared challenges.
In reality, CNI sectors are interconnected and interdependent. A hospital can’t function without electricity. A logistics network depends on roads and telecommunications networks. A national broadcaster relies on energy and digital infrastructure.
This interdependency means that a failure or compromise in one sector can cascade into others, something we’ve seen play out in real time. Take the impact of Storm Arwen in November 2021, when major power outages left some without access to their digital land lines, and no way of contacting emergency services. In 2021, railway drainage problems caused by blockages in the waste water network almost caused the National Blood Bank to flood.
A single umbrella approach wouldn’t erase sector-specific needs, but it would create a framework for shared resilience, allowing for standardised security baselines aligned with frameworks like the NCSC’s Cyber Assessment Framework, while still accommodating sector-specific regulations. It would enable cross-sector threat intelligence, so an attack on a utility company could trigger pre-emptive defences in transport or healthcare, supporting proactive risk modelling and identifying choke points before they cause systemic failures.
Breaking down the silos
Whilst interdependencies exist, there continues to be little cross-sector collaboration right now. CNI leaders rarely meet to discuss shared challenges or potential solutions. That needs to change. Industry can pioneer mechanisms to foster collaboration, such as CNI roundtables that bring together CTOs and senior leaders from utilities, energy and transport to tackle common issues like IT and OT convergence and exposure to cybersecurity threats.
These cross-industry discussions have proven value, for example, during a recent workshop with a rail client, Atos demonstrated an intelligent waste water network monitoring solution built for a utilities company, which uses IoT sensors to detect blockages in pipelines. There were immediate parallels for monitoring rail track conditions, proving that solutions from one sector can be adapted to another with the right framework.
Introducing the CNI Passport
Another major efficiency barrier in CNI is security clearance. Today, each sector, and sometimes each department within a sector, has its own vetting process. Moving a specialist from a transport project to a defence contract can take weeks, if not months, of re-clearance.
A standardised CNI passport would enable engineers to move between sectors without repeated background checks, enabling burst capacity for critical projects, such as pulling in a Geographic Information System (GIS) expert for a two-week rail construction task. It would also help retain institutional knowledge, as teams could rotate across related CNI projects rather than being siloed.
Specialised skills are required for short-term projects, like GIS system optimisation, however onboarding experts quickly under the current clearance system is a struggle. A unified passport would remove these bottlenecks while maintaining rigorous security standards.
Learning from the AI frontrunners
When driving shared innovation across CNI, it’s clear not all sectors innovate at the same pace. That is especially visible with relatively new technologies like AI. Our work in the defence sector is a prime example of a frontrunner in this space. One of our partners was able to automate cost estimation, previously an eight-month consultant-led process, using trained agentic AI teams to deliver results in under 20 minutes. This same approach is now being explored in the rail sector, where AI promises to revolutionise construction planning and risk assessment.
Despite the potential benefits of AI, 74% of companies struggle to scale AI projects according to data from Boston Consulting Group, and over 30% never make it to production according to Gartner. Taking an umbrella approach could help lagging sectors avoid reinventing the wheel by creating shared AI blueprints, such as adapting the defence sector’s agentic AI for rail or utilities, and pooling data governance best practices to accelerate safe deployment.
Some of the most transferable innovations come from the deployment of digital twins and IoT solutions, Atos’s work with utilities had direct applications in transport. Similarly, the converse is true where rail clients have developed synthetic environments, these are digital twins of rail sections, that could inspire similar models in water or energy networks. But business cases for digital twins can be hard to justify due to upfront costs. A unified CNI approach could help spread risk and share ROI models, making investment easier for all.
The UK’s CNI doesn’t need a one-size-fits-all overhaul; it needs a collaborative backbone. The technology exists. The expertise exists. Now, it’s about joining the dots. The umbrella isn’t about control, it’s about connection. And in an era of escalating cyber threats and climate pressures, that connection could be the UK’s biggest infrastructure advantage.
