Following the Industry 4.0 vision of a full digitization of the industry, time-critical services and applications, allowing network infrastructures to deliver information with determinism and reliability, are becoming more and more relevant for a set of vertical sectors.

Network Applications is seen as a full-potential enabler for future vertical industries beyond current deployment. Therefore, it must be considered along with other 6G enabling technologies in the next-generation network architecture.

A trend in future networks (i.e., beyond 5G and 6G) is the increasing virtualization and disaggregation of networks (i.e., Open Radio Access Network, network function virtulization/software-defined networking, or disaggregated optical networks, among others).

The fact than more and more Cyber-Physical or IoT systems are integrated in vehicle fleets, coupled with the growing connectivity of these devices, poses a higher risk of cyber attacks, due to the increased attack surface.

Cybersecurity ecosystem in EU is a hot topic, as it relates to the recent establishment of the EU Cybersecurity Competence Centre (ECCC), the Network of National Coordination Centres (NCCs) and the Cybersecurity Community (CC).

With the increased digitalization and adoption of cost-effective off-the-shelf components and cyber connectivity, Critical Infrastructures (CI) operators have benefited in many ways, but the attack surface has also become larger.