Today, enterprises depend on the Internet and computer networks. Costs associated to network malfunctions are huge, estimated around 30K€/hour; companies average 175 hours of downtime per year, which yields losses above 5 M€/year per company. To avoid these huge costs, network administrators require network visibility: the ability to understand what happens in a network. Thus, companies are investing in visibility tools; the market of Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) is currently estimated at $2.4Bn, growing at >11% yearly. However, enterprises today are still not investing as much as they should in network visibility, because of (1) deployment complexity, which requires expert technicians and planned interventions, and (2) high upfront costs of both hardware and software-based solutions. A revolution in the networking world called SDN is currently undergoing. This new technology allows software components to alter the network, which becomes almost “programmable”. This opens a window of opportunity to create a SDN visibility product that removes both barriers: it can be deployed with one click, offered cheaply from the cloud at scale, and billed on a subscription basis. The market of SDN is currently $3.5Bn and will grow 10x until 2018. We believe that by combining SDN and network visibility we can at least double the market of our segment, increasing it by $2.4Bn. The objective of this project is to refine our current Business Plan and reduce the uncertainties in the project. By reducing risk, we will consolidate it and open it to further investment. In particular, we will seek an early adopter and refine the value proposition of our first version of the product. We are a company that commercializes network visibility solutions; our product (unrelated to SDN) is currently in commercialization stage, with many large-scale deployments. We therefore have the technical and business expertise to build and commercialize a novel network visibility product.

"EPIC has contributed to the modernisation of European Higher Education by developing a flexible framework for international student projects, carried out across universities and in collaboration with industrial partners and research environments. It has been developed, tested and refined based on the experiences of three years, and it has been made available along with supporting materials published as Open Educational Resources. The materials also document our experiences through qualitative and quantitative evaluations, examples and success stories. The framework provides different models of setting up international and interdisciplinary student projects, reflecting different needs and regulations - making the framework useful for most institutions who want to work with international, interdisciplinary and/or problem based projects. The approach developed is scalable and cost-efficient due to the use of virtual collaboration and blended learning. The framework has also demonstrated its value through good evaluations, and by being used by partner institutions and beyond. For example, many ideas of EPIC are continued in a new initiative on collaborative student projects, bringing students from different disciplines and countries together to work on problems related to the sustainable development goals, and including universities from Europe, South America and Africa.Each year was conducted as a cycle, consisting of:-Planning of projects and collaborations-Preparation of training materials, guidelines and seminar-5-day project planning seminar for students and supervisors-Project work, virtually but with the option for one additional blended mobility-Evaluation and reflection-Dissemination activitiesStudents, teachers and companies were involved throughout each cycle.Due to Covid-19, the additional mobility in the last year was cancelled, and part of the dissemination went virtual. Yet, the project prepared us to work within all the restrictions also in our other teaching tasks.After the evaluation of each yearly cycle, the framework and materials were revised. Year 2 focused especially on improving the support for students by streamlining the whole process of carrying out the projects (e.g. by integrating the preparation phase better with the project planning seminar, by facilitating a more structured workflow during the project seminar, and by linking the outcome of the seminar better to the virtual collaboration). Year 3 focused especially on creating a joint scope for the various projects to enhance collaboration and understanding between the projects - using the Sustainable Development Goals for this turned out to be a very good approach.The framework developed is flexible, and allows students from different backgrounds and countries to work together - even if learning objectives and workloads are different - and allows for both tight and loosely coupled collaborations. It has been tested with teams of 2-10 students, and it was demonstrated that the approach makes it possible to integrate and recognise the work within existing programmes, which is important for a more widespread take-up.The project work is supported by ICT-based educational resources that are made available for the students and supervisors, focusing on e.g. project planning/management, team work, entrepreneurship and innovation, supervision, and other documents that supports the take-up of the approach for companies and universities. Also, an open source IT tool was customised to support the collaboration process. All the materials developed are publicly available for use and exploitation, and are presented in a user friendly online course format.The partnership has contributed to increase the quality and relevance of higher education within and beyond the participating institutions particularly by focusing on increased employability, closer collaboration between students and industry, internationalisation, increased labour market relevance of education, increased learning outcome by promoting active learning methods based on real-world problem solving, promotion of the take-up of ICT tools and Open Education Resources, and by giving the students transversal competences. The evaluations show that the project had a significant impact on the participants, and we also see a systemic impact on the participating organisations. As planned, more than 2.000 teachers were reached face2face, and 6 conference papers were published targeting practitioners and the didactical society (including a student paper that won the ""Best Student Paper Award""). 25 companies (including three Centres of Applied Research) were involved in student projects, along with 102 students and 50 supervisors (incl. repetitions). In summary, EPIC has developed and tested a paradigmatic formula for carrying out industry/academia collaboration, and for implementing the project based learning with groups of students of blended expertise and background."

Nowadays, cybercrime is one of the most relevant and critical threats to both the economy and society in Europe. Establishing efficient and effective ways to protect services and infrastructures from ever-evolving cyber threats is crucial for sustaining business integrity and reputation as well as protecting personal and sensitive data. To that end, the SHIELD project proposes a universal solution for dynamically establishing and deploying virtual security infrastructures into ISP and corporate networks. SHIELD builds on the huge momentum of Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV), as currently standardised by ETSI, in order to virtualise security appliances into virtual Network Security Functions (vNSFs), to be instantiated within the network infrastructure using NFV technologies and concepts, effectively monitoring and filtering network traffic in a distributed manner. Logs and metrics from vNSFs are aggregated into an information-driven Data Analysis and Remediation Engine (DARE), which leverages state-of-the-art big data storage and analytics in order to predict specific vulnerabilities and attacks by analysing the network and understanding the adversary possibilities, behaviour and intent. The SHIELD virtual security infrastructure can either used by the ISP internally for network monitoring and protection, but it can also be offered as-a-service to ISP customers; for this purpose, SHIELD establishes a “vNSF Store”, i.e. a repository of available virtual security functions (firewalls, DPIs, content filters etc.) from which the ISP customers can select the ones which best match their needs and deploy them to protect their infrastructure. This approach promotes openness and interoperability of security functions and offers an affordable, zero-CAPEX security solution for citizens and SMEs. Moreover, SHIELD services can be easily scaled up or down, configured and upgraded according to customers’ needs, as opposed to security solutions based on monolithic hardware.

Most enterprises depend on the Internet and on computer networks. Costs associated to network malfunctions are huge and have been estimated via market surveys from around 30,000€/hour on average, which yields average yearly losses of more than 5M€ per company. Because network downtime is so costly, companies invest in network visibility solutions. The market of Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) is currently estimated at 2,200M€, growing at >11% yearly. However, enterprises are still not investing as much as they should in network visibility, for two main reasons: Deployment complexity and Upfront costs. Current products are hardware based, are very expensive and their license costs must be paid up-front. Should these two barriers fall, the NPM market would explode, as every mid-to-large company, even the larger SMEs, would acquire such solutions. The first requirement to avoid malfunctions and correctly operate a network is visibility (the ability to understand what happens in a network). A technical revolution is currently undergoing, called Software-Defined Networking (SDN). SDN allows software components to act on the network and make it “programmable”. SDN opens the door to create a zero-hardware network visibility product that can be deployed with one click, seamlessly collect network traffic statistics, and send them to the cloud for analysis and can also alter the behaviour of the network based on that analysis. Through SME Instrument Phase 1, Talaia has developed a Minimum Viable Product demonstrating its technological viability, has implemented a Business Plan which proves the feasibility of the solution and has placed itself in an advantageous position to gain this new market niche. Talaia will develop a fully-featured product, and offer it as a service using the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model and take it to international markets for large-scale commercialization. Forecasts estimate 64 new jobs and sales of more than 17M€by 2022.