Editorial Coordinator, “Security for Safe and Secure Social Infrastructure” Issue

Social infrastructure systems provide uninterrupted 24-hour/365-day services such as the electric power, gas, and water that underpin daily life and business activity. The social infrastructure systems that deliver these services are steadily advancing and seeking to improve efficiency, increasingly operating over wide areas, with interoperation between different providers and use of systems based on the Internet of Things (IoT). Meanwhile, it is also true that the incidence of damage-causing attacks on social infrastructure systems is rising, with an increase in the number of terroristic incidents taking place internationally and a greater diversity of cyber-attacks.

Work on security is being undertaken by government and industry bodies. In Japan, government agencies are working together through the National center of Incident readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity (NISC) to formulate rules and guidelines, and statements on security have been issued by industry bodies.

With reference to this situation and to these rules and guidelines, this feature issue of Hitachi Review describes Hitachi’s views on what form security should take to keep society safe and secure by protecting social infrastructure from security threats, the concepts involved with achieving this, and various technologies, products, and solutions, including examples of their use in the field of social infrastructure.

Based on its concept of protection at the system, organization, and operational levels, Hitachi supplies total solutions for social infrastructure that extend from consulting on the upstream end of the value chain to system implementation and security operations. In its solutions, Hitachi draws on its advanced security technologies, which combine the cyber and physical realms, on its many years of experience supplying social infrastructure systems, and its experience of operating information technology (IT) infrastructure for its own workforce of approximately 300,000 people.

I hope that this feature issue of Hitachi Review will give readers get a better understanding of the security concepts proposed by Hitachi, and that it will contribute to building safe and secure social infrastructure systems through collaborative creation with many organizations, starting with social infrastructure companies.