Okay, thanks a lot. And by the way, this is the, probably one of the first observations we've been talking about digitalization. We have been talking about the importance of cybersecurity for years and years and years. And I have the feeling now that meanwhile, everyone has really understood that this is something which is not only nice to talk about. It is something you really need. And this would be one of the probably observations at the end of my, my short talk.
I would like to share with the, with the audience in terms, what are the, the, the, the takeaways of, of the experiences of the last of the past couple of months. So probably first of all, if you move on to the first slide, I have prepared just a couple of thesis to, to describe my, my observations. So first thesis is that what Corona has definitely approved is that digitalization has become essential, essential backbone for state and society.
And there's no doubt anymore about it.
Just as explained, we have been talking for years about that, and even in the political domain, you won't find anybody who doubt that digitalization is important, but what we still have been lacking in is that we have putting enough and sufficient funds, for example, that we have been lacking in putting the right priorities to that. And now we have seen how important it was to, to be good prepared. Just to give you an example, I have take over a couple of months ago, also the role of the CIO of this government.
And we have been asked to provide within 24 hours a complete move from physical meetings to virtual meetings. So we have been doing in this, let's say more conservative country, everything in real life. So we didn't have the tradition of having online meetings. Like it might by might be, have a longer tradition in the, in the, in the corporate sector with us.
We don't have any tradition in that.
And we have been asked, we stopped all physical meetings within 24 hours, and we have been asked to move on and we established within really very, very short timeframe, a complete infrastructure for that. And, and this is probably something which is really interesting is that we achieved to convince the people who has been working in the administration to move seamless to this tool.
We had, we had times where we had more than thousand concurrent video conferences on the same time. And even people has been using this tool. I would never have been expected them to use anything which has, which is a little bit more modern than a traditional phone. So it works. And the second step is that we has been asked to move most of our employees into, into homework. And we have been, we had the challenge to move on roundabout, a couple of 10,000 of employees into homework to provide secure infrastructure for them.
As you can imagine, we are working with very critical data.
And so we can't just do it with, without having, without ensuring a really secure environment for them. So we did that in two weeks, providing secure VPN and infrastructure scaling it. We provided more than 10 times as we had before, in terms of the capacity. We increased the capacity of our public internet connection by the factor of 10. So we had several 10 gigs additional. So all these things has been done within a very short timeframe. And at the end of the process, the guys who are doing this, the, the, the digitalization guys, they haven't been anymore.
The nerds somewhere on the hill, nobody knows how they look like they, they got to the, to, to the key factors for enabling the, the, the administration to keep on working. So we have a complete change in the way the, the, the, the cyber guys has been seen from, from outside.
The second thesis is if we go to the next slide, is that one of the interesting lesson lessons also I learned is that we have a very fast development and that we had learned that public administration can do agile, and they can do it in a very, very, let's say modern way, if they want to, just to give you an example outside of the, of the it world. So we had decided to, to bring in regulations, and we did this regulation, which is you probably know, regulating the, the public life and so on. And this regulation has been issued by the, by our state cabinet. And I'm participating in that.
And we had, we did this regulation within less than 48 hours. Normally you need this regulation to be processed in the, the administration for more, for a couple of months before you can issue such a regulation in the way we have, we did it, but the pandemic situation forced us to, to, to follow another way, which you would say it's a very agile way.
So we went out with this regulation, even knowing that there will be part of regulation, which will be probably revised after, after it has been checked, for example, by from the legal side. And this is exactly what happened.
A couple of regulations has been revised. We needed to change it a couple of months later, but we, we have been able to, to go out very, very fast and to provide a first set of regulation, which has been urgently needed. And this is a perfect example of agile. We have been doing this in the, the it world for years and years, and now the publication learned that this has an clear advantage to do that.
So the next point is, if you go to, to 0.3 is, and this is something I want to, I think this whole, regardless of the pandemic situation, so cybersecurity will become a key parameter key parameter, not even only to enable the digitalization, the, the importance of, of cybersecurity will make it as a, a key parameter within geopolitical conflict.
And if you go to the next slide, just to give you an example from, from the world economic forum, looking at the short term risks for the current, for the, for the next year, and we will see from the five prioritized risks, cyber attacks is one of, of these relevant things. And so we see that cybersecurity is not more something which plays a role. It is something which has a major impact of the, for the, for the economic risk of the, of the future.
And if you go to the next slide, we will see that there is a significant question I've participated and contributed to a, to a scenario modeling last year by the think tank shift politic last year. And they asked me the question. If we look at the geopolitical conflicts between China and the U, we will see that there is a major question along of two axis.
The first axis is will we have an world which is more fragmented or more integrated?
So that means will China, the us Europe has their own ecosystems also in the digital world, their own platforms, they're all cloud services, or will we have an integrated one? And the second question, and I think this is one of the biggest challenges is the question. Whether we will see a digital world, which is vulnerable or a digital world, which has some kind of resilience, and this is something I think, and this is my experience that we don't have an answer yet. And we don't have even a perspective on that.
And I will just try to explain that a couple of words till now, we don't know that whether cybersecurity is an technology, which prefers an attacker, or if it prefers the defensive part. And just to give you an example, technology may change strategic approaches fundamentally.
So when the machine gun has been invented 150 years ago, it changed the advantage toward the defensive part, because you could defend and location with very few people.
If you have a machine gun, even if you have a lot of attackers and in the cybersecurity domain, we still don't know if we will have a technology in the future where you can defend attackers with a very few means of, of, of resources, or if you can use with was a very few resources as an attacker to attack in an asymmetric way, large infrastructure. And this is one of the major issues I think we need to consider and to see in the future.
And this is I think, a very important observation, which has a lot of consequences for the companies looking at cybersecurity, but also for states and for geopolitical strategies within the big powers.
If we go a little bit to the next slide, think we can go another slide and another slide. I think this is just a couple of distance. Yeah. So this is my, my, my fourth thesis that I would say that the technology, the, the, from a technology perspective, cybersecurity is still open.
And we need to, one of the things I will probably just conclude at the end and say by now is that we need to put still a lot of research and the society and the ecosystem that probably finds the best solutions for cyber security at an early point of of time will have a significant advantage also in the economic sector. So the next thesis is also very important point, which has to do with technology in, for cybersecurity.
Artificial intelligence will become a significant game changer, and you will see that if you see the advantages in, in artificial intelligence in other domains, if you look for example, at automotive and, and self-driving cars, when DAPA started its grand challenge in 2004, 2005, no team was able to conclude the challenge, just driving fully autonomously within 200 miles within the, the desert of Nevada and 2012.
So eight years later, the self-driving capacity has been in the standards of a lot of, of cars. So we will see a very, very rapid change and technology, technological ability.
And this will change the cybersecurity. If you see that a lot of, of defensive and attacking manners has been done with, with smart guys doing so we will see that this will be replaced step by step, by fully autonom autonomous systems. We have been, we have seen an, a challenge, a cybersecurity challenge from the upper a couple of years ago, I would say the results are okay.
So it's not nothing really surprising, but just comparing it with DAPA challenge on automotive drive driving, we can expect that within the next five years, we will see completely new systems, which are fully autonomous in the attacking. And that means that defensive is not going to work by manual means.
And we definitely need to see how we, how we can cope this race between the attack and the defender and including artificial intelligence.
It will make the, the question, whether we will have an advantage for the attack or the advantage for the defender, even more complex, so that we will need to have even more resources in that area in terms of, of research and technology provided. And so that me brings me to the last thesis. We need to draw the right conclusions. And let me just point out what I think what would be the, the, the most important things we need to, to look at.
So, first of all, I'm pretty sure that we need more resources for research in cybersecurity. So we're doing a lot on cyber security, especially in Europe, we're putting a lot of funding into cool research projects, but I'm pretty sure we would, we would need to do that also on that level, or even on a higher level for the next five to 10 years, because there's still a lot of to do.
And it has a major impact on the economic power of Europe. So that means means we, there is a real need for that. The second thing is we need also to put more resources in terms of users of it.
We are the government as a CIO, but even, but also for the, for the companies who are trying to secure their infrastructure, we'll see much more move to digital infrastructures. And that would definitely need also more resources, cybersecurity. And we have seen that things turn out to, to come very, very, very quick. So if we have something like a pandemic situation, it's too late to start looking about cybersecurity for securing the infrastructure.
So this is something, everything all needs to consider early and to have the, the scalable measures, the scalable infrastructure for cybersecurity, so that he's, or she is prepared for any scaling in digitalization. And I would say we will see that in the coming years, in, in very different times, not only for crisis, but especially for crisis, it's going to be very important. So probably from my side, that would be a couple of thesis. And I'm very happy to, to answer questions or to have some thoughts on what have been presenting so far.
