CSIT Labs

Engineering viable ventures in cyber security.

The Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT) is the UK’s National Innovation and Knowledge Centre (IKC) for cyber security. Based at Queen’s University Belfast CSIT is also an “Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research” (ACE-CSR). With a multidisciplinary team of 88 people (academics, researchers, industry experienced engineers and business development staff) CSIT is industry focused, pursuing impact and commercial exploitation. A critical component to the UK’s strategy for emerging technology CSIT is accelerating the exploitation of cyber security innovation and has acted as the nucleating point for an emerging Belfast cyber cluster of companies that total over 1000 new jobs created in recent years. CSIT’s activities are shaped by; Member Companies (Allstate, BAE Systems, Camlin, Equiniti, Euronext, IBM, Intel, Roke and Thales), government stakeholders (including GCHQ, DSTL, CAST and CPNI) and a growing list of Associate Members (currently 18 SMEs). CSIT has spun out 3 new companies (Titan IC Systems, Activ Wireless and Sensurity), is actively involved in coordinating and contributing to a number of European Research programs (Horizon 2020) and has extensive links internationally. Established in 2009, with initial core funding from EPSRC, Innovate UK, Invest NI and Queen’s University Belfast, CSIT has proven its success. In March 2015, further ‘phase 2’ core funding of £5M from EPSRC/Innovate UK and £9M from Queen’s was announced. This will enable CSIT to leverage further funding and revenues up to £38M over the next 5 years.