ETIS believes that trusted collaboration and information sharing are fundamental to strengthening the security and resilience of Europe’s telecommunications infrastructure. As the collaboration platform for the European telecom industry, ETIS brings together major telecommunications operators and technology suppliers to exchange practical knowledge, operational experience, and best practice in a trusted environment.
Telecommunications networks underpin every area of modern society and the economy. Energy, transport, financial services, healthcare, government, and emergency response organisations all depend on reliable communications and digital connectivity. Protecting telecom infrastructure is therefore essential not only to the continuity of individual operators, but also to the resilience of Europe’s wider critical infrastructure ecosystem.
Through the European Telecommunications Information Sharing and Analysis Centre — the ET-ISAC — ETIS supports cooperation between telecom security professionals across Europe. Its specialist working groups address areas including information security, threat intelligence, business continuity, security awareness, anti-abuse, red-team operations, and quantum-resilient security. These groups provide a trusted setting in which operators can share real-world challenges, incidents, lessons learned and practical approaches to emerging risks.
ETIS also emphasises that resilience depends on more than technology alone. Strong leadership, effective security awareness, skilled personnel, trusted relationships, and a willingness to share both successes and failures are all essential. By bringing together professionals from across the telecom ecosystem, ETIS helps its members improve preparedness, strengthen incident response, and develop more coordinated approaches to physical, cyber, and operational threats.
As communications networks become increasingly interconnected, resilience also requires greater cooperation across sectors and national borders. The experience and intelligence shared through the ETIS community can help telecom operators anticipate emerging threats, reduce disruption, and support the continued delivery of the essential services on which society depends.
To explore these issues, Ben Lane spoke with Andrija Višić, Senior Community & Programme Manager at ETIS and manager of the European Telecommunications ISAC.
Andrija will be speaking at CIPRE 2026 in the session: https://www.cipre-expo.com/session/infrastructure-interdependencies-and-cascading-effects/ and contributing to the ISAC workshop on Wednesday October 21 – 4.00pm to 5.30pm.
The role of telecommunications in Europe’s critical infrastructure resilience
Q: How does ETIS view the telecom sector’s role in keeping Europe’s wider critical infrastructure operating, particularly as energy, transport, finance, public services, emergency response, and digital services become increasingly dependent on secure and resilient connectivity?
Andrija Višić
ETIS’s view is that this dependence cuts both ways. Telecom operators are not just another regulated critical sector; they are the enabling sector. This means telecom resilience has quietly become a precondition for everyone else’s resilience. Telecom failure modes propagate across sectors in ways that no single operator or national authority can see alone. That is precisely why peer exchange between operators, across borders, is not a nice-to-have but a structural necessity. It is also why the ET-ISAC works deliberately across the full stack — from CERT/SOC-level threat intelligence exchange and CISO-level strategy to business continuity — rather than treating security as a purely technical discipline.
The changing threat landscape for telecom operators
Q: What are the main cyber, physical, geopolitical, and operational risks currently facing European telecom providers, and how are these threats changing the way operators think about resilience, continuity, and preparedness?
Andrija Višić
I will refer directly to our most recent Telco Security Landscape 2026 publication, available here in full. The telecom security environment continues to be shaped by growing geopolitical tension. Over the past year, these pressures have shown little sign of easing. Across Europe, evolving power dynamics and regional uncertainties continue to affect societies, economies, and the resilience of critical infrastructure. This reality highlights the importance of sustained investment in defence, security, and reliable civilian communications systems, which are vital in times of crisis. State-driven threats remain a major concern, but they represent only one part of a much broader picture. Many telecom operators depend on technologies and computing resources from regions where tensions are rising, while advances in cloud technology and artificial intelligence are increasingly exposing the limitations of long-established security practices.
Threat intelligence sharing and the value of trusted communities
Q: ETIS supports several security-focused communities, including its Information Security, CERT-SOC, Security Awareness and Anti-Abuse working groups. How does trusted information-sharing between operators help strengthen preparedness, response, and sector-wide resilience?
Andrija Višić
The value proposition is simple: attackers already collaborate; defenders must too. A campaign targeting one European operator is highly likely to target its peers, often using the same infrastructure, tooling, and social-engineering lures. Trusted sharing reduces the time between the ‘first victim’ and the ‘sector prepared.’ However, ETIS’s experience is that trust matters as much as the sharing itself. Formal reporting under NIS2 produces compliance data; peer communities produce candour, often through honest conversations about ‘what actually went wrong in our response’ that never appear in regulatory filings. That candour is only possible in a member-governed, non-commercial, and vendor-neutral environment where participants know exactly who is in the room.
Cyber-physical resilience and business continuity
Q: Telecom resilience is not only a cyber issue. How should the sector think about the connection between cyber security, network availability, supply chains, physical infrastructure, emergency planning, and business continuity, particularly during crisis situations or large-scale disruption?
Andrija Višić
The Baltic cable incidents settled this argument: telecom resilience is cyber-physical, or it is nothing. A dragged anchor and a ransomware operator can produce the same customer-facing outcome — loss of service. Both must be absorbed by the same continuity machinery.
In telecoms, the dominant resilience gaps are rarely technological. They are often gaps in communication and coordination: situation reports that are not aligned between organisations, incident language that is too technical for decision-makers, and responsibilities that are not sufficiently clear.
Redundant routes, backup power, and hardened landing stations matter, but so do well-exercised crisis playbooks, pre-established cross-sector contacts across energy, transport and national authorities, supplier continuity arrangements, and the ability to produce a common operational picture across borders.
Security awareness, workforce capability, and human risk
Q: ETIS has a dedicated Security Awareness Working Group focused on helping telecom organisations improve internal awareness, security behaviour, and organisational culture. In large and complex telecom organisations, how important is the human factor in building resilience, and how can better awareness, training and workforce engagement help reduce risk and strengthen preparedness across the sector?
Andrija Višić
Again, let me refer to one of our 2025 publications on security awareness, available here in full. In an increasingly connected world, where cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated, building a resilient workforce is essential. An integral part of this resilience is the combination of security awareness, a positive security culture that is open-minded and employee-oriented, psychological safety, and targeted training. Together, these elements create an informed workforce capable of actively contributing to the organisation’s security and stability. Regular campaigns, interactive training sessions, and accessible resources foster a shared sense of responsibility across all roles. Telecommunications and technology companies benefit immensely when employees trust that speaking up will contribute to improved processes rather than punitive measures. By fostering this openness, organisations enable the rapid identification and mitigation of vulnerabilities.
Regulation, collaboration, and the future of telecom resilience in Europe
Q: How can telecom operators, regulators, EU agencies, ISACs, public authorities and other critical infrastructure sectors work together more effectively? What role can the European Telecommunications ISAC play in wider European coordination, including through its links with the EU Council of ISACs?
Andrija Višić
The collaboration layer is where the sector can move fastest, and it is where ETIS sees its role. The ET-ISAC emerged from a multi-year European project mapping ISAC activity, which also resulted in the foundation of the EU Council of ISACs, an informal initiative to coordinate the work of ISACs across Europe. That matters because the interdependencies described in the first question are cross-sectoral: a telecom ISAC talking only to telecom operators misses half the risk picture. Structured links between telecom, energy, finance, and other sector ISACs — alongside ENISA, national CSIRTs and regulators — are how a cable cut in the Baltic, a grid event or a shared-supplier compromise can be understood as one European incident rather than twenty separate national ones.