National cyber security strategies: management, unification and assessment

Abstract

Cyber security has become an important issue both on the EU and the national level. Cyber security is now perceived as a part of national security. The newly emerging cyber security policy, comprising national cyber security strategies as an important constituent part, has been recently paid considerable attention. Speaking of national cyber security strategies, a positive thing is that the majority of EU member states have already approved such strategies. However, the approved strategies differ considerably in terms of their content and implementation. The present article aims at identifying reasons for differences in individual national strategies and analyses aspects of their unifications in expectation to find out an optimum balance between the degree of unification and the need to retain differences arising from intrinsic national singularities. To this end, the article analyses the issue of national cyber security on the basis of Lithuania's cyber security strategy as a sample in the context of ENISA good practices for the development of cyber security strategies and by application of ENISA developed KPIs and testing ENISA cyber security strategy evaluation tool. Finally, the article suggests recommendations on further development of national cyber security strategies in terms of their unification and national singularities.