Qinetiq consortium to study comms

The UK MOD’s Research Acquisition Organisation (RAO) has awarded a Qinetiq-led consortium the Enabling Secure Information Infrastructure (ESII) programme.

Won under competitive tender, the initial four tasks are worth in excess of £5m and form the first research packages let under a three and a half year enabling contract.

The consortium, comprising 23 leading British defence contractors, Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and top British universities, will assist the MOD in maximising its communications capability. As part of the Defence Industrial Strategy and Defence Technology Strategy, this contract will research ideas and technologies to improve the flexibility, efficiency, resilience and security of the MOD’s Communication and Information Services (CIS) systems. The aim is not only to secure MOD’s access to critical technology and techniques, but also to enhance the CIS configuration process, while reducing overhead and delivering more frontline performance.

The first tasks will be to evaluate the benefits of ‘wideband mobile communications’ and ‘policy & infrastructure management’ to support end-to-end voice/data convergence. The other two tasks in this first package are looking at an assessment of the security properties of different technologies in a military context and the impact of their use on security policy and to scope future research for the Global Information Infrastructure (GII).