Awareness Deck regarding the importance of Communications Infrastructure Engineering in the digital era

1. The importance of CIE
in the digital era
AWARENESS DECK
BY: RICARDO MANUEL BAIAO JORGE DE ALMEIDA

2. WHAT IS CIE?
IMPACT ON SOCIETY
RISKS
CONCLUSIONS

3. What is CIE?
The principal scopes of practice
for CIE are:
• Planning and design of trusted communication networks
• Operational oversight of trusted communication networks
• Risk analysis of, and contingency planning for, network infrastructure
Communications Infrastructure Engineering (CIE) is related to the design and operation of the electronic networks
that support all types of data communications.
CIE looks after the data in transit and is primarily focused on the reliability, availability, security, and privacy of
networks, calledTrusted Network, rather than on their physical aspects (such as cabling, Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G, 5G,
transmission and receiving devices, etc.)
The essential activity of CIE is the system-level design and management of secure or trusted communications
networks.

4. WHAT IS CIE?
IMPACT ON SOCIETY
RISKS
CONCLUSIONS

5. Impact on Society
With the massive growth of Digital
Infrastructure to cover the rapid
expansion of wireless
communications devices such as
iPhone™, Android™ platforms,
Windows Mobile™, and the rapid
grow of 24/7 online services such as
banking, bill payment, and
information services, users are
becoming heavily dependent of
digital infrastructure.
The Digital era is here to stay, the
IoT (Internet ofThings) is taking its
first steps and it will certainly change
our lives in the future.
All organisations want to be part of
the day-to-day lives of their target
audience and to take advantage of
that presence to conduct business.
That´s why organisations all over the
world are investing heavily in digital
transformation with the support of
governments and public institutions
such as the European Commission.
As a matter of fact, the European
Commission has recently announced
its plans to help industry, SMEs,
researchers and European public
authorities to take full advantage of
new technologies.The plans include,
among other things, an investment
of over 50,000 million dollars to help
digitize the industry.

6. Impact on Society
Personal communications is only the tip of the iceberg — other critical infrastructures (operational
infrastructures) are also dependent upon digital infrastructure.
• Electric power, natural gas, oil production, and transmission systemsEnergy and Utilities
• Telecommunications, broadcasting systems, software, hardware, and networks,
including the Internet
Communications and Information
Technology
• Banking, investment, securities, payment processingFinance
• Hospitals and other health care facilities, blood supply, laboratories, pharmaceuticalsHealthcare
• Production, processing, distribution and safetyFood
• Drinking water and wastewater treatment / managementWater
• Aviation, rail, marine, road, mass transitTransport
• Law enforcement, fire, search and rescue, emergency servicesSafety
• Social services, regulationGovernment
• Defence, industrial base, chemical industryManufacturing

7. Impact on Society
•OperationalTechnology (OT) rely entirely in digital
infrastructures and consist of platforms used in running the
operation of physical assets of enterprises, especially those
that involve taking specific actions.
•(e.g. controlling electricity or energy flow, valves, lighting,
ambient environment, machine tools or robots).
Also Internet ofThings (IoT) rely entirely on digital
infrastructures, and consists of a network of dedicated
physical objects (things), that contain embedded
technology to sense or interact with its internal state or the
external environment.
The IoT is an ecosystem that includes things,
communication, applications and data analysis

8. Impact on Society
•It is easy to see the dependence of sectors like Finance (where virtually all transactions are automated), Public
Safety (Emergency and Security) ecommerce (Amazon, Google, Facebook) on digital infrastructure.
But most people don´t realize that water and sewage pumping stations are monitored and controlled remotely
using wireless communication links, as are railway and underground trains and even our electric power grid
including nuclear facilities.These essential services can be compromised by unavailability of the digital
infrastructure on which they depend.
Modern manufacturing is dependent upon automated supply chains and production control applications, which
in turn rely on digital infrastructure.A failure in that digital infrastructure can shut down a production line, with
attendant losses in the millions of dollars per day. It can also adversely affect worker safety.
This is the present, the future is much more ambitious.

9. ENTERPRISE
Impact on Society
Internet ofThings
CONSUMER
 Back-end IT systems
 Predictive maintenance
analytics
 M2M connectivity
(Machine to Machine communication services)
 Processor for monitoring and
control of things
 Jet engine
 Robot
 ATM
 Mobile apps
 Elderly person monitoring
service
 Home Broadband
 Standard mobile data
 Smartphone gateway
 Wireless router
 Baby monitor
 Health and fitness monitor
Applications
and Analytics
Connectivity
Gateway /
Controller
Things
Operational Technology
Source: Gartner
Relationship between OT and IoT at Enterprise and consumer level.

10. WHAT IS CIE?
IMPACT ON SOCIETY
RISKS
CONCLUSIONS

11. Risks
• Risks to society associated with our dependence on Digital Infrastructure
• The Major risks are:
Unavailability
• no food, water, police / fire / ambulance service, medicine, access to
information, financial services, transportation, etc.
Compromise
• contaminated food or water, monetary fraud or theft, identity theft, trains
/ planes / vessels colliding or crashing, etc.
• Threats to digital infrastructure can be either unintentional (hardware and/or software failures, lack of
redundancy or fault tolerance, consequences of other exogenous events such as fires, floods, earthquakes,
power blackouts, wars, etc.) or intentional (hacking, phishing, denial of service attacks, identity theft, fraud,
espionage, etc. directed towards the network itself.)
• While our digital infrastructure is far from immune to unintentional threats, concern is growing about the
threats of deliberate criminal activity perpetrated for financial gain.

12. Risks
What is happening to the digital infrastructure today?
• Every day one can read news items related to cyber abuse:
• The theft of customer data from Sony’s online gaming service, forcing shutdown of the service
• Foreign spies penetrating government systems, forcing the governments to disconnect from the Internet
• Industrial/commercial espionage conducted to give the perpetrators unfair competitive advantage
• Denial-of-service attacks against popular websites; and so on.
• At a personal level, most of us have received scam email designed to defraud us or to trick us into disclosing
account numbers and passwords (known in the cyber security industry as phishing). And many of us have
experienced the infection of our personal computers with spyware designed to capture and report our online
activities to others, or some form of malware, such as a worm or a virus designed to render the computer
inoperable and/or its data unusable.
• These abuses are all predicated on the unrestricted connectivity provided by the internet.

13. WHAT IS CIE?
IMPACT ON SOCIETY
RISKS
CONCLUSIONS

14. Conclusions
• Engineers have always been at the forefront of innovation and exploitation of technology, so it is no surprise
that many of them have turned their skills to the challenge of building and maintaining trusted network
facilities.
• Thus far, most have acquired the special technical skills necessary to do this work on the job. Only recently
have accredited engineering programmes started to emerge that focus on this area of professional practice.
• “CIE” needs to mature in order to be recognized as an engineering discipline. Improving CIE practice
standards within industry and government, collaborating with other stakeholders, and shaping future
legislation and regulations will help to contribute to solving the world’s cyber-security crisis.
• This is an area that needs development, and needs to be fully regulated.

15. Conclusions
Recently the European Commission proposed concrete measures to accelerate the setting of standards within
the Digital Single Market strategy:
 Focus on 5 priority areas, by requesting the industry and standardisation bodies to develop standards in the
following areas:
 5G
 Cloud computing
 Internet of things
 Data technologies
 Cybersecurity
 Co-financing testing and experimentation technologies to accelerate the establishment of standards,
including public-private partnerships; thus, the timely development of standards will be guaranteed to drive
innovation and growth of enterprises.

16. References:
http://www.gartner.com
http://www.peo.on.ca/
https://www.ic.gc.ca
http://ec.europa.eu/priorities/digital-single-market_en