Irish Innovation: A multi-factor approach to building cyber resilience

As we head into the Christmas season and begin to wind down for another year, it’s important to be aware that the holiday season is a peak time for cyber-attacks in Australia. These incidents can significantly disrupt business operations and do lasting damage to consumer trust. Though it’s often high-profile breaches that grab the headlines, bad actors don’t discriminate based on company size. SMEs, often resource-poor, are particularly vulnerable and the cyber skills gap is only widening.

To bolster the cyber security capability of the Irish SME base, Enterprise Ireland supports the Irish cyber ecosystem in a number of ways.

Launched in collaboration with the National Cyber Security Centre, EI’s Cyber Security Review Grant helps SMEs across all sectors to take steps to review and update their online security measures to mitigate against the risk of cyber-attacks. The grant provides EI clients with access to cyber security experts who conduct independent reviews, identify vulnerabilities, and develop clear roadmaps for businesses to enhance their security measures.

As a member of the Cyber Ireland cluster group, which brings together Industry, Academia, and Government, we collaborate to enhance the innovation, growth, and competitiveness of the wider cyber ecosystem.

Enterprise Ireland also directly supports over 60 homegrown cyber security companies to scale overseas, some of which are helping to bolster cyber capability in Australian and New Zealand organisations:

TitanHQ is a multi-award-winning SaaS platform protecting SMEs and MSPs against phishing attacks, malware, ransomware, and other cyberattacks that can compromise data and disrupt operations. TitanHQ’s recently launched Security Awareness Training (SAT) solution helps organisations to further bolster defences and reduce human risk through easily deployed phishing simulations and learning content tailored to employees’ behaviour.

Award-winning EdTech company Prodigy Learning also recently launched its Cyber in Minecraft credential programme to equip middle and high school students with practical skills across Digital Citizenship, Networking and Security. Delivered in Minecraft Education, this brand-new credentialling pathway engages young learners through game-based learning experiences that build key cyber skills and provide them with information about relevant roles in industry.

Tines is an automation and orchestration platform designed to power the world's most important workflows. With secure AI capabilities, the flexible and intuitive platform eliminates the need for programming skills, enabling security and IT teams to build, run, and monitor their mission-critical processes. Tines already supports a wide range of customers, including Databricks, Elastic, Kayak, Mars, and Australian unicorn, Canva.

SIREN is a search-based platform that provides integrated investigative intelligence combining previously disconnected capability of search, business intelligence, link analysis, and big data operational logging and alerting. Siren has been used extensively in both government and corporate threat search scenarios, empowering teams protecting the most sensitive and critical networks to be proactive in their threat stance.

With some of the world’s leading experts, researchers and companies in the cybersecurity space calling Ireland home, homegrown Irish startups are well placed to uplift the cyber stance of global organisations and build awareness and skills in the next generation.

To learn more about Ireland’s capability across Cyber Security and Enterprise Software, contact Judi at Judith.harrington@enterprise-ireland.com