Past Events

Aligning and Sustaining IT Infrastructure for Business Benefit

Date: June 9th 2005

Venue: The British Computer Society, 5 Southampton Street, London

This event focused on a topic close to the heart for many IT Directors, managing infrastructure, with two authoritative speakers examining current and continuing issues in this field.

Managing and sustaining infrastructure for business benefit represents a continual challenge for IT Directors, balancing – for example – the normal constraints of business with the need to provide a platform for reliable services and new developments, in the context of fast-changing technology.

In the first presentation, Denise Plumpton, recently appointed Director of Information and Board member at the Highways Agency, drew on her extensive experience in diverse industries to identify some of the key issues facing CIOs and IT Directors in this area, and identified some of her own ‘top rules’ for steering a way successfully through the maze.

Security of infrastructure is of significant concern to IT Directors, and now attracts much public attention, particular in the Financial Services field.

Our second theme introduced The National Infrastructure Security Coordination Centre (NISCC), an inter-departmental Government Centre set up in 1999. Its role is to minimize the risk of electronic attack to the Critical National Infrastructure (CNI ). Defence, Central Government Policy, Trade, the Intelligence Agencies and Law Enforcement all contribute expertise and effort to NISCC.

Mark Oram Deputy Director (Threat Assessment and Response) of NISCC was our second speaker. In this talk, Mark outlined the scope of the CNI, and of the NISCC’s role in protecting it, and described the services that NISCC provides to the public and private sectors. He identified how electronic risk profiles continue to change, and indicated the nature of NISCC’s response to these.

Denise Plumpton's presentation (PPT 120kb)
Mick Morgan's presentation (PPT 1.4mb)