Single European Railway Area Sample Clauses

Single European Railway Area. Need for Shared Security Response 8

Single European Railway Area. Need for Shared Security Response Railways are a particularly strategic area of European Shared Infrastructure and are one of the most extensive cross-border and pan-European “essential services”. Railways are conjoined by their physical and IT systems to operate the Single European Railway Area [SERA]. Within the SERA model, widely implemented by European railways, European economic activity benefits from open access operations on railway lines by companies other than those that own those railway lines. Such “open access” operations require not only the “lines” but also their supporting infrastructure (train signalling, routing, messaging for freight management, etc.). This means that all European railway infrastructure, both physical and IT, can be conceived as a single network. Within each country the different rail operators are interconnected (physical infrastructure and IT) to ensure management and coordination of passenger and freight services – inter-organisational collaboration. Between countries this is also true, and so SERA depends on cross-border inter-organisational collaboration to ensure effective and safe operation of European railway business. The rise in cybercrime targeting Industrials Control Systems (ICS) converges with this development of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). Since these ITSs are not isolated, the increasing level of integration among transport systems brings increasing needs for cyber-security coordination between Operators of Essential Services (OES2). European railways are both OES and “Critical Infrastructures” (CI), where CI is the body of systems, networks and assets whose continued operation is required to ensure the security of a given country, its economy, and public safety. Each Rail OES is potentially open to threats originating both within their “own” systems, and also via other access opportunities present in the integrated SERA. Within a single organisation, identification of threats and response to threats can be more easily coordinated by an internal security team (e.g. an internal CSIRT), but between inter-connected and coordinated business entities, the “response” aspects will have to be coordinated between organisations – hence the potential benefit of a European Railway CSIRT involving security teams from multiple Rail OES.