Australia’s telco sector has only basic measures in place to respond and recover from disruptions like cyber incidents and natural disasters, a new report from the ANU Tech Policy Design Centre reveals.
The report, to be released on Thursday, marks the first time the resilience of the sector has been profiled at the sector-level and comes after Optus’ 12-hour nation-wide outage last year exposed regulatory gaps.
Commissioned by the federal Infrastructure department, the report uses a new sector resilience maturity framework developed by the Tech Policy Design Centre, which gave the sector a score of two out of five and the label “developing”.
The score of two out of five indicates that there are basic resilience measures in place, “including initial efforts to coordinate sector-wide”, the Australian Telecommunications Sector Resilience Profile reads.
But after consulting with 204 stakeholders and a 26-member risk and resilience expert panel, the report “shows recurring patterns related to failure to integrate lessons from disruption”.
Sector-level coordination between telco providers, regulators and end users has been called out as an area for particular improvement, as has resource allocation, including in when responding and recovering to incidents.
Improvements to resilience capabilities “relating to data, standardisation, cross-sector engagement, and consequence management” are also needed, although its approach to asset maintenance and infrastructure hardening is more mature.
The report also found a disconnect between policy objectives and industry needs is in part caused by industry scepticism that government regulation will “impede market forces”.
Industry also expressed hesitancy to cooperate for fear of cartel allegations which has created an environment “where distrust and entrenched positions hinder sharing of information about critical vulnerabilities”.
Before the report, sector-level resilience has been difficult to assess as individual businesses and different levels of government have different approaches and definitions of resilience.
Tech Policy Design Centre director Johanna Weaver said that with the methodology around measuring resilience relatively new, “it’s not surprising” that the telecommunications sector’s resilience is still developing.
“Our research shows that Australia is starting from a good foundation and, importantly, there is strong appetite from all stakeholders – in government, industry and civil society – to do better,” Professor Weaver said.
“This Profile is an invitation and a roadmap to enhance the resilience of the telecommunications sector on which all Australians depend every day.”
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