The Singapore government is looking for cybersecurity solutions in areas like artificial intelligence (AI) for security, cloud security, privacy enhancing technologies, and security for operational technology (OT) and internet of things (IoT) systems.
For this, the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA), along with its partners, National University of Singapore (NUS) Enterprise and TNB Ventures, issued a Cybersecurity Industry Call for Innovation 2022 (CyberCall 2022) on Thursday.
CSA said the CyberCall initiative, first launched in 2018, “seeks to catalyse the development of innovative cybersecurity solutions”.
Singapore’s Senior Minister of State, Ministry of Communications and Information (MCI), Janil Puthucheary, said the government saw the CyberCall as an important effort to grow the cybersecurity ecosystem in the country.
“It provides a platform for companies to innovate in partnership with large, trusted end-users in Singapore, and private and public sector owners of critical infrastructure… We hope this approach benefits both cybersecurity companies and end-users that we have engaged,” Puthucheary said.
Since 2018, CyberCall has supported 22 cybersecurity companies to develop over 30 solutions in areas such as cloud security, AI, IoT and OT security and privacy-enhancing technologies, the same set for which the call for innovation has gone out for this year.
A total of S$10 million has been awarded to all projects in past CyberCalls.
“Companies were able to raise another $40 million in external investments to support the next-stage development of these projects, reflecting their significant commercial potential,” Puthucheary said.
For CyberCall 2022, CSA has put together a list of challenge statements provided by six end-users who are looking for solutions to address their cybersecurity concerns.
The end-users are: Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC), Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX), Mediacorp, PacificLight Power, SMRT Corporation and SP Group – which are
The six entities submitted seven challenge statements, which fall into four broad categories:
- The use of AI for cybersecurity to reduce the time it takes for end-users to make important decisions and address risks by offering customised risk analysis;
- Cloud security to provide a suite of security measures designed to protect cloud-based infrastructure, applications and data;
- OT and IoT security to defend OT systems and IoT devices against potential cyber threats; and
- Privacy-enhancing technologies to protect the privacy of end-users Personally Identifiable Information (PII) provided to and handled by service providers or applications.
The submission deadline for CyberCall 2022 has been set to November 30 this year.
CSA will invite companies whose proposals are shortlisted for discussion with the participating end-users for potential co-innovation, adoption and test-bedding.
The agency added that the proposed solutions should be ready for testing and deployment within a 24-month timeframe and should be of Level 6 and above in terms of the Technology Readiness Level benchmark created by the US space agency NASA.
Puthucheary said that with the growing demand for cybersecurity products and services, the Singapore cybersecurity market has tripled from around $570 million in 2015 to approximately $1.7 billion in 2021.
The minister added that the global cybersecurity market has been estimated at between US$145 billion (S$203 billion) and US$165 billion in 2021, and projecting to be US$255 billion by 2026.
“We are a small and highly connected country with a skilled workforce. We should be well-placed to harness this as an engine of growth for our economy,” Puthucheary said.
