Finland government has come forward to help Small and Medium Enterprises(SMEs) in bolstering their IT defense-line against cyber attacks. On December 12th if this year, the Ministry of Transport and Communications (MTC) launched a voucher-based scheme dubbed ‘Information Security Voucher’(ISV).
The Finnish government launched the ISV initiative in collaboration with the National Cyber Security Centre(NCSC) and under this scheme will fund SMEs to upgrade their IT infrastructure in such a way that they can mitigate themselves against threats existing in the current cyber landscape.
In simple words, the scheme is nothing but a sort of financial assist offered to SMEs to enhance their security capabilities against hybrid threats.
Often we saw that small-scale businesses do not have the right expertise to save their IT infrastructure, and that is because of budget constraints. ISV will help them by giving financial help to hire IT expertise.
The scheme will be divided into 2 categories- first will be a voucher worth €15k meant for small-scale enterprises and the second will be of worth €100,000 meant for medium enterprises.
ISV scheme taken up by Finland coincides with the other initiative of the same govt of accelerating business digitization backed up with Artificial Intelligence 4.0 programme.
NOTE- If history is considered, a government initiative to bolster IT infrastructure of SMEs with a sort of prepaid vouchers appears to be the first of its kind. Hope, more such initiatives will be taken up by governments across Europe, America and Australia, as it not only offers an easy-to-access training model to improve cyber threat management competency.
