Taotlus

Bucharest, 25 July 2024

Dear coordinator,

As you are aware, Regulation (EU) 2021/887 establishing the European Cybersecurity

Competence Centre (ECCC), indicated, in Article 8 that the ECCC shall register entities,

at their request, as members of the Cybersecurity Competence Community (The

Community). Such registration should be preceded by an assessment made by the National

Coordination Centre (NCC) of the Member State in which those entities are established.

In addition of being mandatory, the creation of the Community is essential for the

fulfilment of the ECCC and network of NCC tasks. It helps the communication and

synergy among members and with the ECCC and it is necessary in order to set-up the

Strategic Advisory Group and relevant community working groups. For this reason

dedicated funds have been granted to your NCCs through the 2022 DEP topic “Digital-

ECCC-2022-Cyber-03-NAT-Coordination”

For maximum efficiency, registration of new entity on the common platform (The Atlas)

shall be performed at national level using online portals via a common Application

Programming Interface (API). Through these portals, community members can easily

register, be assessed by the responsible NCC and be included in the Atlas. In order to

facilitate this process the ECCC has made available technical references and support. In

addition, several NCC have already implemented API solutions and are available to help

other NCC members. A free open-source tool (OpenXeco) has been developed by the

NCC-LU and can be used by any NCCs. For this API, documentation and support are

available at [email protected].

In view of that and to facilitate the registration process the ECCC kindly invites you to

initiate a grant amendment with the points outlined below which will help us align our

efforts and resources effectively, benefiting all parties involved.

Annex 1 of your NCC grant shall be amended as follows:

• Add a requirement to register entities using an APIs, excluding any other mean

(such as email, PDF), and develop a national portal to this purpose. A manual

solution may be used ad interim (max 6 months), as the portal is being developed.

This manual interim solution may include sending data from NCCs systems such

as Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) via the API but shall not

include manual registration by ECCC/EC.

• Add a requirement to allocate sufficient technical resources tasked with developing

the national registration portal (including design and development using

OpenXeco or any other custom solution), relevant testing including communication

Ref. Ares(2024)5395951 - 25/07/2024

2

with the Atlas via API, and deploy. For duration of the grant, such resource will

monitor registrations and proceed to troubleshoot any issue that may arise.

• Add a requirement to assess registration requests as per: Regulation (EU)

2021/887; registration forms and guidelines developed by the NCCs and any other

relevant decisions by the GB and NCC Network (including ownership assessments

and any relevant national assessment on security grounds)

We appreciate your consideration of this request and your cooperation for the

implementation of this very important task.

Kind regards

Luca Tagliaretti

Executive Director