The Spanish cybersecurity sector is on a high for two reasons. Firstly “Securmática”, the Global Cybersecurity, Information-Security and Privacy Congress, organized by the trade review SIC, is celebrating its 30^th anniversary: three decades offering an up-to-date overview of the sector, highlighting the outstanding projects each year. Secondly, a consortium primed by the Spanish company GMV has recently won  the biggest ever contract in Spain’s space history, namely for maintenance and upgrading of the ground control segment of the Galileo satellite constellation, with cybersecurity as one of the main components.

On the strength of this, GMV has been awarded one of the SIC prizes in the Securmática 2019 Awards, picked up by Luis Fernando Álvarez-Gascón, General Manager of GMV’s Secure e-Solutions sector. During his thankyou speech Luis Fernando explained this success as the result of decades of hard work, a 35-year track record in which the European Space Agency has turned time and time again to GMV’s proven expertise in innovation, business development and internationalization. These strengths have all helped to win the firm worldwide leadership in telecommunication satellite control centers and satellite navigation systems. These factors, combined with GMV’s 25 years of experience in the cybersecurity world, have been key in achieving this groundbreaking contract.

The executive stressed the importance of this contract award not only for GMV but also for Spain itself, because it was by no means a sure thing that a university spinoff would successfully manage to turn itself into the industrial leader of a critical project at European level. “This contract award is the result of GMV’s proven expertise but it is also owing to political support of innovation, talent, entrepreneurship and internationalization, and we now need a new wave of similar public support for the national cybersecurity industry. We face an unmissable chance to be stakeholders in this digital transformation instead of mere onlookers”.

One part of the contract consists in providing a set of cybersecurity services including security engineering, secure development, vulnerability management, accreditation and implementation of an audit program, among other features. Juan Ramón Coz ESA’s GNSS Cyber Internal Auditor, and Juan Antonio Abánades, Manager of GMV’s GCS Security Sector, gave a congress lecture setting out the cybersecurity challenges in the critical environment of Galileo’s ground control segment. The cybersecurity experts explained how auditors will have to tackle such challenges as planning, and sketched out some of the lessons learned during the cybersecurity audit of major systems and public programs, with large budgets and in critical, high-security environments.