The new Scottish Centre of Excellence in Security and Cybercrime will play a critical role in supporting the evolution of public and private data sharing. Our decision to support this exciting proposal to establish the Centre in Scotland was not a difficult one.

The vision for creating a world-leading centre focused on security and cybercrime was bold, backed by a plan to promote excellence in research, knowledge transfer, and teaching.

The planned collaborators in the Centre were also impressive, incorporating law enforcement operations such as the Scottish Drug Enforcement Agency and the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (Scotland), as well as Scotland’s leading universities and private sector players such as Microsoft.

The Centre will be led by Bill Buchanan, Professor at the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University (www.napier.ac.uk) and head of the Centre for Distributed Computing and Security. The unique partnering of academia, industry and domain experts is likely to be a key factor in helping the proposal secure funding.

At a business level, there is also a stated desire for the Centre to stimulate business innovation and solutions to tackle financial fraud, e-crime and cloud computing infrastuctures – shaping the development of world-class IP and commercial products.

There is certainly little doubt about the scale of internet security and cybercrime issues. With internet access increasing across the UK, improvements in broadband speeds, and even government plans to push public services online (from obtaining a car licence to benefits), the importance of creating an infrastructure offering high levels of security and trust will be critical to shaping a safe online environment.

From the issue of a single email infecting millions of PCs with malware, to under-reporting and the technical nature of the crimes themselves, e-crime also presents a particularly complex set of challenges for law enforcement organisations and the criminal justice process generally.

We are excited to see how the centre develops over the coming year and what part Memex can play.