Mr. Pat Larkin:

It is my pleasure to be welcomed here today by the Cathaoirleach and members. I am the chief executive and co-founder of Ward Solutions, one of the largest indigenous, dedicated cybersecurity companies in Ireland. We spend our time helping a wide range of commercial, public sector, government and other organisations from a wide variety of sectors on the island of Ireland to secure their people, data and systems from malicious and inadvertent threat. Prior to this I had the privilege to serve my country as an officer of the Irish Defence Forces at home and overseas with the UN.

Since our foundation in 1999, Ward Solutions has witnessed a number of things that are relevant to the committee's purpose here today. Ireland's citizens, organisations and society have transformed to a sophisticated and prosperous digital economy, with a very significant digital dependency. Significant technology and born in the cloud sectors have emerged indigenously and through foreign direct investment to a point where Ireland now holds upwards of 30% of European cloud data in data centres located on the island.

The dramatic digital transformation of traditional bricks and mortar organisations, including government, led to a very high digital dependency based on accessing and servicing the markets via digital channels. A lot of business and wealth now located in Ireland has digital roots and is, therefore, much more portable as distinct from less portable legacy business. This portable business and wealth can easily relocate to countries that are in a position to appropriately secure it.

In the field of cybersecurity we have witnessed the emergence of cybersecurity on global, national and corporate risk registers, consistently as one of the top three risks, along with climate change and global pandemic, and the increasing occurrence of all three risks. We have witnessed the relentless increase in the scale, sophistication, and effectiveness of attacks directed against individuals, organisations and the State from criminals, hacktivists and militia to a point where the financial scale of cyber crime at €6 trillion annually has overtaken the global illicit narcotics trade.

Organisations are increasingly challenged to protect themselves from inadvertent or non-malicious cyber events that similarly threaten their survival or prosperity. There is a global shortage of cybersecurity talent, estimated to be about 3.2 million professionals by 2022. The cybersecurity market emerged as a massive opportunity for Irish companies, conservatively estimated to be worth $173 billion in 2020, and growing to $270 billion by 2026. There is an emergence of a vibrant cybersecurity ecosystem in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland.

We work with our clients through the full cybersecurity lifecycle of assess, protect, detect and respond. There is one absolute observable trend that we and our industry generally notice. Clients who invest and adopt a systemic approach to their cybersecurity posture, who work to move from an immature approach to a fully optimised approach, suffer from the same hostile environment but are typically breached less. When breached, optimised clients respond quicker and better and thus suffer less impact and cost to their business. Cyber-optimised organisations treat cybersecurity as a journey, not a destination.

Ireland now needs a fundamental acceleration of our approach to national cybersecurity. We have a society worth defending and we need politically and societally to move towards a national defence mindset with our national cybersecurity as one of the key pillars of our defence. We need to move to leading and developing national and global consensus, to collaboration on cyber law, norms, ethics and behaviour, and to the global enforcement of same. We need a full-blooded, joined-up, coherent and committed strategy for our defence, encompassing all government, national security and intelligence, industry, academic and research resources, to out gun the cyber bad actors. We need to adopt a ten-year goal of making Ireland the cybersecurity capital of Europe. We can do this by developing a world-class cybersecurity ecosystem in Ireland so we have the resources in country to secure ourselves. In doing so, Ireland also stands the possibility of benefiting from a rapidly growing cyber marketplace, estimated to be worth $270 billion by 2026. We need to raise our game nationally from an immature to an optimised approach to cybersecurity, to protect our citizens, our government and our economy.