Over the past decades, the Cronos Group has emerged as a leading player in the Belgian IT landscape in various fields of expertise. To better live up to its societal and economic responsibilities in the field of cyber, Cronos Security joined the Cyber Security Coalition as a premium member. In this role, Cronos Security aims to help shape the Coalition’s future strategy with a powerful collective in multiple cyber disciplines present at Cronos. Jonas Buyle, Business Manager at Cronos Security, and Wouter Decruy, founder and managing partner of ACEN, one of the Cronos companies that develops tailor-made cyber solutions, explain why.
“By joining as a group, we can significantly increase our influence”
In its 33 years, the Cronos Group has grown from a one-man business into a conglomerate of more than 600 tech companies. Each one has developed solutions or services to help clients enhance creativity, improve efficiency or tackle today’s digital challenges. “About half of all public institutions and around 80 percent of Belgian hospitals are our clients for one or more services, for example. As we have an important societal role to play in terms of cyber security, at the end of last year we decided to become a premium member of the Cyber Security Coalition,” says Jonas Buyle.
Practical and strategic benefits
Several companies under the Cronos umbrella were already members individually. “By joining as a group, however, we can significantly increase our influence and present ourselves as a whole,” adds colleague Wouter Decruy. “You could say that we first built our own coalition, and now are connecting it to the Cyber Security Coalition in Belgium, as we firmly support the same goals.”
The value of its Cyber Security Coalition membership has already become evident after just a few months. “By participating in focus groups, for example, we can share our experiences from different sectors. This helps us to get to know our own clients and their challenges even better, while it also brings up fresh ideas and concerns both during the sessions and the networking opportunities. It really helps us to think beyond our own expertise and get that critical client perspective, which benefits us all in the ambition to raise the cyber maturity for the society at large.”
With its broad range of activities, Cronos Security and its affiliates could potentially participate in almost every Coalition focus group. “Clearly that’s not feasible, so we need to make the right choices for us. For example, the adoption of technological applications is a topic of particular interest for us” says Wouter, who participates in the Focus Group Identity and Access Management. “Another area we actively contribute to is the Focus Group Cyber Incident Detection & Response, a closed group due to its sensitivity but extremely relevant to be sharing observations and intelligence to protect the integrity of our country”, Jonas adds.
Contributing to strategic development
As a premium member, Cronos Security is also involved in the Coalition’s Programme Committee and Strategy Review: governing bodies that reflect on the organisation’s future strategy. “We consider how we can better position the Coalition to attract more members, and which strategic pillars need to be further developed, which could lead to e.g. new focus groups,” Jonas explains.
This strategic reflection is essential because the challenges of the cyber security landscape will continue to increase in the years to come. “These include the combined impact of increasingly rapid technological evolution and a shortage of skilled professionals, which requires us to think about fostering more specialisation amongst the people available in our field of cyber security,” states Jonas.
“Another upcoming technological challenge is that technology vendors are offering increasingly comprehensive platforms to the business world, which leads to greater dependency on these SaaS-solution providers. For cyber security, this increases the risks, because solutions must be tailored to the individual client. Moreover, the more widespread a technology is, the more attractive it becomes for malicious actors. Therefore, we need to continuously convince vendors to develop more hybrid, interchangeable platforms. This is a long-term effort, and we certainly have a long way to go,” concludes Wouter.
