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Premier of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia Hannelore Kraft visits secunet branch in Essen

[Essen, 17 July 2015] Hannelore Kraft, Minister President of the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, visited the IT security expert secunet on Wednesday as part of her "NRW 4.0" summer tour. 

The transition to a digital age would not be possible without the required IT security. During her visit to Essen, the Minister President discovered how premium IT security solutions are being developed right in the heart of North Rhine-Westphalia. 

Minister President Hannelore Kraft enthuses: "There is significant call for secure IT systems in a digitalised industry. secunet provides answers and practical solutions to these issues. The security solutions being developed here in the Ruhr region are pioneering and in demand across the globe." 

Modern working environments need reliable security solutions, such as SINA. SINA is the synonym for the most successful German encryption system which secunet created in cooperation with the Federal Office for Information Security back in 1999 and continues to develop. The various different components allow sensitive data, right up to strictly classified information, to be reliably processed, stored, transmitted and verified. 

A major focus of the discussion led with the Minister President centred on cyber security for critical infrastructures. An outage at or impairment of regional water companies, power plant operators and the energy sector, for example, can have significant repercussions on the North Rhine-Westphalian community and population. Since critical infrastructures today are managed and controlled using information and communication technologies, it is essential to protect the IT networks from targeted cyber attacks (hackers, cyber terrorism, industrial espionage). Solutions from secunet are already contributing towards making critical infrastructures secure.

While taking a tour of the Essen site, the Minister President also obtained an insight into Managed Security Services (MSS) at secunet. Due to the increasing complexity of IT infrastructures, as well as the diversity and intensity of current cyber attacks, companies are themselves rarely able to provide an appropriate level of permanent security. In the MSS control centre, clients' IT infrastructures are monitored around the clock. Irregularities and attacks are identified early on and countermeasures are implemented promptly. 

At the last point of call on her tour, the Minister President learned about the latest generation of secunet easygates – an automated border control solution already in place at the five largest airports in Germany as part of the EasyPASS project. Thanks to the easygates, travellers benefit from a quick and uncomplicated border control procedure while border control officials are relieved of extra work, thus allowing them to concentrate on travellers who are subject to further screening. These systems are a good example of how closely IT security in the digital world is associated with security in the real world.