We are entering a period of historic universal change. The traditional thinking of national security has changed and continues to evolve into new areas that threaten and disrupt the very fabric of our societal and economic well-being. The interconnected world in which we live means global effects have local impact. Risks are no longer obvious, some events and unrest may be deliberate and others may be of natural causes but our resilience to those events underpins every aspect of our daily lives.

It is therefore crucial that the UK continues to develop and maintain resilient infrastructures, many of which we take for granted.  For example, many of us don’t realise that to make contactless payments for our shopping, join online meetings, or plan travel for local and international journeys all depend on a resilient time infrastructure. 

Infrastructures come in many forms and developing, maintaining, and protecting them requires considerable research and development, investment, knowledge and skill to ensure they are robust and provide the necessary protection we all expect.

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Our aim is to ensure the UK can securely harness and exploit resilient infrastructures and technologies and have confidence in the intelligent and effective use of data. Today we are working on a number of programmes to achieve this goal:

• Resilient communications infrastructure
• Building confidence in quantum technologies
• Providing a resilient time infrastructure
• Ensuring confidence in data
• Resilient autonomous systems

By integrating them across our National Challenges we are helping secure individual and organisational health and prosperity in secure and sustainable environments. 

NPL is perfectly placed to support this challenge through our programmes and already supports industry, government and academia in providing measurement frameworks to deliver resilient and secure infrastructures.

We are involved in the establishment of secure, traceable and authenticated data sources. By embedding measurement into resilient infrastructures, we can all go about our daily lives with confidence.

Prof Neil Stansfield - Head of National Challenge (Security & Resilience), NPL

The first duty of the Government is the security of its citizens. Security is not only preventing physical threats, it is also about securing our way of life, society and economy.  NPL will provide the measurement infrastructure to ensure the security and resilience of our world, from confidence in communication infrastructures to trusted timing, ensuring a resilient foundation for everyone to go about their lives with confidence.

Contact us to find out more about our work in security and resilience, and learn more of the expertise available through collaboration with our experts.

NPL is supporting key areas of security and resilience to:

• provide trusted measurement infrastructure to ensure security and resilience for the UK
• encourage the development and exploitation of critical new security and resilience technologies, such as, timing and quantum
• provide the measurement infrastructure to build resilient communications networks
• build confidence in decisions based on understanding of complex data systems
• provide assurance for autonomous systems

Our researchers are at the forefront of new innovations that promise to deliver secure and resilient infrastructures to new security and resilience challenges. We play a vital role in providing the standards and assurance to provide confidence in new products and providing reliable data. Learn more about our research areas and working with our experts. 

If you have a research collaboration where our expertise can help, please can contact the team and discuss your challenge.