The 35th AFCEA exhibition and the 25th European Police Congress are the two main trade fairs for internal and external security, and once again brought security authorities and industry together for dialog this year. SVA has supported both events for many years, even during the pandemic. Everyone participating was relieved to be able to enjoy the event largely as normal with very few restrictions or hygiene rules. The exhibitions attracted a lot of visitors, with the face-to-face dialog in specialist forums and industry presentations taking an even more central role in the event program.

Resilience in the sector

The topics under discussion in the sector have also evolved, moving away from the challenges of lockdowns and working from home often faced by administrative IT specialists during the pandemic. The boom in end devices has thus reached its peak, while procurement pressures due to ongoing supply bottlenecks remain high. Data centers are being virtualized almost everywhere, while simultaneously being subject to increasing requirements in terms of performance, availability and security. Encrypted methods of communication are being introduced across the board, with ever greater focus on their reliability, management and failure safety.

The exhibition and congress showed that geopolitical events are accelerating the trend toward cybersecurity and resilience in particular. The intensity of the war in Ukraine, alongside threats from actors in third countries, certain groups and organized crime have underlined the need to strengthen internal and external security. The digital and analogue elements are becoming ever more entwined, in both a positive and negative sense. Digitalization and cutting-edge applications are helping to close these attack vectors, while digital sovereignty is having an increasing influence on national resilience.

Getting the most out of data

Now more than ever, there is a need to mine the flow of data for relevant information. The aim is to do what is feasible without losing ambition – and, to this end, specialist processes need to be expanded with proven, data-driven solutions. The solutions include dashboards that show information from various sources and in different formats in a divided overview. SVA’s portfolio includes solutions such as facial recognition, automated evaluation of video material, text indexing and automatic data analysis. These are important foundations for decision support systems that take administration work to a new level and relieve employees of painstaking searches. This can then be expanded with semantic searches, attack detection and prevention, or forensic applications that create clear and reliable reports.

Why SVA?

The growing flood of data is creating new challenges for infrastructure and compliant data retention. Breaking up data silos and making the flow of data useful – while also ensuring availability, confidentiality and integrity – are requirements that flow directly into the solution architecture. In addition, the industry has recently developed ways of reflecting ethical questions or specific regulatory requirements. SVA helps customers effectively reduce dependencies and avoid data gravity with solutions from various vendors.

The list of specifications that we were able to draw up with our customers and partners at the exhibitions is therefore well filled. We are looking forward to the 36th AFCEA exhibition and 26th European Police Congress next year.