FORTIKA: helping businesses to respond to cybersecurity incidents

A cyber attack can cause major damage to your business. Effective protection and response can become a major differentiation and competitive advantage for European small-medium businesses (SMEs) and especially those which traditionally do not possess the appropriate resources and/or relevant expertise.

The FORTIKA consortium made it possible to develop within 3Y a competitive market-ready cyber-security solution, addressing the needs of modern SMEs, worldwide.

- Dr. Dimitrios Tzovaras, FORTIKA Project Coordinator

FORTIKA is an EU-funded project under Horizon 2020 (grant agreement No. 740690). The project started on the 1st of June 2017 and lasted for 3 years.

The FORTIKA project aims to provide SMEs with an embedded, smart and robust hardware security layer (FORTIKA Gateway) enhanced with an adaptive security service management ecosystem (FORTIKA Marketplace). Security services vary from access-control to AI-powered real-time data filtering. Thus, providing services exclusively from the cloud may in some use cases fail to meet latency requirements. The proposed architecture is built around an innovative, low-cost, security by design, FPGA hardware accelerator, while the FORTIKA marketplace functions as a single point of access for each SME. The SMEs are able to benefit from tailored security services aligned with their actual needs.

FORTIKA Project: providing an innovative cybersecurity service

FORTIKA has developed and demonstrated a new technology for minimising the exposure of SMEs to cybersecurity risks while relieving them from all efforts of identifying, acquiring, and using the appropriate cybersecurity solutions. One of the most innovative features of FORTIKA is that, along with its new cybersecurity technologies, the project has developed a marketplace to trade its cybersecurity products for SMEs offered by reviewed third party developers and vendors. FORTIKA enables an on-premise alternative to the cloud-based cybersecurity solutions for SMEs, allowing them to reap the benefits of low cost, low energy consumption and efficient computing of FPGA-based Edge acceleration.

Considering that in 2020 more than 10 million new unique pieces of malware are registered per month and 43% of targeted attacks in 2019 were aimed at SMEs, it is evident that FORTIKA addresses a large market. This is where the opportunity lies and where the FORTIKA solution fits best: the hybrid solution  (hardware-software) developed consists of a security ‘seal’ for SMEs reinforcing their trust and facilitating further adoption of digital technologies, strengthening in this way their position compared to the non-European competition. Furthermore, it is benefiting investments in the cybersecurity ecosystems on new product development through an open competitive marketplace.

Visit the FORTIKA project page to learn more about the project and its cybersecurity solutions.