EU GOVSATCOM is being established by pooling capacity of commercial and military satellite communication providers and sharing with the users authorised to access these pooled capacities. Similarly to Galileo PRS, the GOVSATCOM users ave to be authorised users to get access to services.
EUSPA has already been entrusted with the following preparatory activities:
- The establishment, growth, coordination and management of the Network of the future EU GOVSATCOM users. The Network already counts on more than twenty organisations, including Member States and EU Agencies. Led and coordinate by EUSPA, the Network aims to compile and understand user needs and define a detailed roadmap for the innovation on the future GOVSATCOM user technology. This is managed through the ENTRUSTED project, a Horizon 2020 Coordination and Support Action that pursues research in the field of SatCom. It aims to contribute to the successful implementation of the EU GOVSATCOM initiative, which will provide guaranteed, reliable and cost-effective access to SatCom capacities and services for governmental users.
- The support in the definition of the Security baseline of the programme, which will be essential to ensure adequate fulfilment of the security needs to the users approved by the competent GOVSATCOM authorities;
- The definition of the architecture for the secure ground infrastructure, also known as Hub, which will be in charge of aggregating the supply and making it available to the users.
Secure SatCom services are able to fulfil the needs of the users in charge of the supervision and management of' security-critical missions and operations. For this class of users, SatCom security have to be commensurate to the level of risks that they are ready to accept whilst making use of the service, such as:
- Assurance that GOVSATCOM service or resources are guaranteed and cannot be pre-empted by non-governmental users or third parties
- Resilience against jamming and interference
- Protection against interception and intrusion
- Protection against cybersecurity threats
- Non-dependance on third parties
A large survey with governmental users has recently been launched, see here.