Under the Civil Service Business Appointments Rules, on the 22nd February I applied for permission to accept an appointment from Huawei to be their first Global Head of Cyber Security reporting into the Group CEO, and founder, Mr Ren. On the 12th July the Prime Minister, on the advice of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments and following a thorough investigation of the case approved the application, subject to me waiting for a period of 6 months from when I left the Civil Service. So I join on the 1st October.
I have to say I am both thrilled and privileged to join Huawei. As a company we serve a third of the world's population with our technology, and 45 of the world's top 50 telecommunications operators are core customers. We employ over 110,000 people from 150 nationalities and operate in more than 140 countries. Supporting this we have 20 R&D centres from San Diego to Dallas, to Stockholm, Milan, Moscow and Bangalore and this is supported by 20 customer centric joint innovation centres.
But what impresses me the most is the passion for excellence with our customers and the brilliance of our engineering. Few organisations can say that over 50,000 of their workforce are engineers that they have 7,500 people with PhD's and contribute to 123 standards organisations such as 3GPP, IETF, ITU, OMA, NGMN, ETSI, IEEE and 3GPP2. We have cumulatively submitted more than 23,000 proposals and served in 180 leadership positions including as board members in various international standards organizations such as OMA, CCSA, ETSI, ATIS and the WiMAX Forum.
So to the role. I will report directly to Huawei's CEO and will be in charge of continuously developing Huawei's cyber security assurance strategy and system and managing and supervising its implementation. The end-to-end cyber security assurance system will be adopted globally by all business groups and across all departments including R&D, supply chain, marketing and sales, project delivery and technical service. The Global Cyber Security Office will be located in Huawei's headquarters in Shenzhen, China and supported by National Security Officers in several countries, such as the UK, India, France and the USA. My role will be to ensure that our cyber security assurance system integrates end-to-end cyber security into solutions covering our cloud computing solutions, pipes/ telecommunications and all devices from mobile broadband to PDA's where appropriate, the customer-oriented business processes and the whole ICT supply chain.
Having spent 7 years in Government with the last 5 as the UK Government CIO and CISO, security was a core part of my thinking, planning and execution. We all accept that as technology becomes more pervasive and we become more reliant on technology we need to come together globally to address the challenges and threats posed by those who would wish to exploit any vulnerability in the technology.
I look forward to the challenge and working at Huawei.
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