INDIA| JANUARY 2020| ISSUE 2 | New standard for ICT accessibility

Message From SESEI

Greeting from Project SESEI !!!

Dear Readers,

On behalf of Project SESEI and its stakeholders, I take this opportunity to wish you all a very Happy New Year 2020.

As per the Morgan & Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Year 2020 will bring positive trends in the global economic growth and a greater focus on trade & investments and creation of infrastructure in the developing economies will be seen. India is witnessing significant interest from international investors in the infrastructure space. This is also reflecting in the strong dialogue being built between India and Europe in all verticals and sectors. Strong partnership on Climate change, Energy efficiency, new and green technologies are being forged between India and the European countries.

In the second edition of our “SESEI Newsletter India”, we have brought together information and updates on the new & emerging technologies and standards development activities being carried out in Europe around our project priority sectors. This exchange of updates and information form a core part of the Project SESEI objectives, ensuring that the stakeholders and partners are always fully abreast and aware of the important developments and standardization related information concerning priority sector covering ICT, Automotive, Electrical Equipment including Consumer Electronics, Smart Cities in Europe.

The other significant objective of Project SESEI is to propel harmony and synergies between the Indian and European standardization bodies to work together in areas of mutual interest. With this as an objective, CEN-CENELEC along with Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) organized a two-day workshop in India on 26th & 27th November 2019, towards creating close working relationship and to understand the commonalities and gaps on standardization strategy and standards development process between India, Europe & Globally. The interactions between the stakeholders from both sides including representation from IEC/ISO were highly engaging and result oriented creating an active roadmap for CEN-CENELEC and BIS to follow-up.

CEN and CENELEC during this last quarter also organized a high-level one day Standards + Innovation Conference ‘Boosting Innovation Through Standards’ to exhibit how European standards contribute to the success of research and innovation activities.

The European Standards Organizations (ESOs) - ETSI, CEN and CENELEC are working together on the development of standards to support Circular Economy Action Plan of the European Commission. Globally due to the environmental impact that we are witnessing, circular economy paves the way for extending product lifetime, ability to reuse components or recycle materials from products at end-of-life, use of reused components, etc. These three ESOs, also jointly developed EN 301549:2019 ‘Accessibility requirements for ICT products and services’. This updated standard is used by public sector bodies procurements while ensuring that digital devices are more accessible – so that they can be used by persons with a wide range of disabilities. Both circular economy and ICT accessibility standards are very important for India as a country.

The European Commission (EC) is also effectively working towards implementation of cybersecurity across various sectors. EC published a report with key findings on how the EU cybersecurity rules under the Network Information Security (NIS) Directive are implemented in the crucial Energy sector, in particular in electricity, gas and oil areas.

The technical Committee of ETSI on Smart Card platform is working on the brand-new security platform called Smart Secure Platform (SSP) and has unveiled the first three technical specifications to launch this new security platform. This Platform will address the security sensitive sectors such as 5G and IoT, etc.

In the ICT domain, CEN - CENELEC launched a new Joint TC on Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) which are among the most promising developments in ICT for sharing data and managing transactions in a decentralized, controlled manner.

ETSI's Open Source MANO group, which focuses on the management and orchestration of virtualised networks, has delivered its latest release, bringing cloud-native applications to network function virtualisation (NFV) deployments. The ETSI Open Source MANO group unveiled its latest release, OSM Release SEVEN. OSM Release SEVEN is at the forefront of edge and 5G operations technology, deploying and operating containerized network functions on Kubernetes. The ETSI Industry Specification Group (ISG) for Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) has started working on its next specification release, known as Release 4 which addresses several new issues in the following technical areas: the evolution of the NFV framework to support the most recent cloud, software, and virtualization techniques.

Apart from the important news we have also provided details of the white papers released by our SESEI project partners and the important events and seminars that they will be organizing shortly. ETSI published a White Paper on Building Key Technologies for 5G, written by several of its Industry Specification Groups’ (ISG) Chairs. These groups have released specifications on key building block technologies for next-generation networks, feeding the 3GPP 5G specifications.

CEN-CENELEC also published work programme 2020 which gives an overview of the main standardization developments and strategic priority areas CEN and CENELEC are ready to implement in 2020 across 14 business sectors.

I would like to conclude with wishing you all a great and very productive year ahead. Happy Reading once again.

Happy Reading once again.

Warm regards,
Dinesh Chand Sharma
(Seconded European Standardization Expert in India)