DTC Subsidy for Greenport West-Holland Cyber Resilience Centre

The Digital Trust Centre (DTC), part of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy, announced that it will grant subsidy to set up a Cyber Resilience Centre for Greenport West-Holland. This centre will become the leading centre of expertise and information hub for cybersecurity within the entire chain of the horticultural sector (production, trade, logistics and technology) in West-Holland.

The cyber resilience centre Greenport West-Holland is an initiative of Greenport West-Holland and Security Delta (HSD) together with Royal Flora Holland, Interpolis-Achmea, Delphy, Dutch Fresh Port/VBO, Hoogendoorn Automatisering, Greenhouse Horticulture Netherlands, The Hague University of Applied Sciences, the province of South-Holland and GroentenFruit Huis. These organisations have formed a 'coalition of the doing' behind the cyber resilience centre. This is supported by the Greenboard, the oversight board of Greenport West-Holland consisting of 50 partners.

Supply Chain Security

Due to the increasing digitisation of production, trade and technology within horticulture, an increasing number entrepreneurs within the sector is confronted with a cyber incident. The consequences of cyber incidents vary between entrepreneurs, from paying a ransom to regain access to their own company network to the shutdown of facilities, which endangers the continuity of their company and that of chain partners. Due to its nature, there is a significant supply chain dependency in the horticulture sector.

Jolanda Heistek, director of Greenport West-Holland: "Digital security is an important precondition for continuous digitalisation of the chain, such as the development of autonomous cultivation. As the exchange of data increases, the vulnerability of the chain also increases if a chain partner is affected by a cyber incident. That is why we can only work collectively on cyber resilience of our entire horticultural cluster, and it is great that HSD offers its expertise from other sectors.”

Due to this joint approach, this initiative connects strongly to the goals of the DTC Cyber Resilience subsidy scheme, which encourage groups of companies in non-critical sectors to work together to raise their cyber resilience levels.

What is the cyber resilience centre going to do?

The most important task of the Cyber Resilience Centre Greenport West-Holland will initially be to provide relevant and clear information, so that companies can take measures to better prepare themselves against cyber incidents.

Bert Feskens of Security Delta (HSD) and programme manager of the Cyber Resilience Centre Greenport West-Holland: ”Through the cyber resilience centre we will provide actionable advice at different maturity levels for entrepreneurs in the chain. We will also encourage companies to actively share best-practices on how they deal with cyber threats so that they can learn from and with each other. A good basis of trust is of great importance for this. In addition, we are investigating how we can best share threat intel with companies within the chain. And we will facilitate the necessary platform to do so.”

The Cyber Resilience Centre Greenport West-Holland will be:

• Providing current, relevant, and clear (threat) information at strategic, tactical and operational level. 

• Working on raising awareness about digital security among entrepreneurs, CEOs, managers and employees. 

• Setting up a digital counter for help and advice.

• Establishing a threat intel sharing platform.

• Facilitating expert meetings for knowledge sharing and networking.

• Facilitating joint procurement of cybersecurity services (such as support for security monitoring via shared service procurement for example).

• The Cyber Resilience Center Greenport West-Holland works closely together with the Digital Trust Center.

Do you want to know more about this initiative? Visit the website or get in touch with programme director Bert Feskens via digitaalveilig@greenportwestholland.nl.

Photo by: Remco Zwinkels