DIGITAL RESILIENCE INDEX: EUROPE IS THE NEW FRONTIER
(Tribute to LE JOURNAL DU NET)
The Association for Digital Resilience Initiative (aDRI), which launched the Digital Resilience Index (DRI) in 2025, has a lot on its plate. David Djaïz, CEO of consulting firm Ascend Partners and co-founder of the organization with Arno Pons, Secretary General of the think tank Digital New Deal, and IT expert Yan Lechelle told JDN that aDRI plans to make the index accessible to SMEs and local authorities. They also want to increase the number of certified consultants to evaluate it and speed up its rollout across Europe.
As a reminder, the DRI is an indicator that measures an organization’s ability to maintain its operations in the face of unforeseen events affecting its IT system. To do this, it looks at factors such as the system’s dependence on non-European vendors, the vulnerabilities of the organization’s digital subcontractors, and its exposure to extraterritorial laws like the Cloud Act.
“Today, the IRN is so sophisticated that it’s mainly aimed at large companies and their governance. It allows CIOs and CISOs to speak to their executive committee and top management with a tool that objectively informs decisions and investments. It also helps them make themselves understood by their management. Nevertheless, together with the Caisse des Dépôts and the Public Investment Bank, we are currently working on producing a simplified version of the IRN for SMEs and local authorities,” explains David Djaïz.
“For us, it will be a great win to make the IRN standard across all sectors regulated by the NIS 2 directive, including SMEs and local authorities. This is part of the aDRI’s roadmap. To achieve this goal, the aDRI is in particular setting up regional hubs.”
In addition to these territorial hubs, aDRI members plan to launch ‘simplified self-assessments’ for SMEs and local authorities.
Another goal of aDRI: “to increase the number of certified consultants to assess companies in order to multiply the impact of the IRN. We’re opening the floodgates to spread the index as much as possible”
Another project of aDRI: “speeding up the Europeanization of IRN,” according to David Djaïz. Currently, IRN is being rolled out in German, Dutch, and Italian companies. “ Here’s what I can already say: Olivier Sichel, who is honorary president of aDRI and CEO of the Caisse des Dépôts group, managed to negotiate, with all the other European and similar deposit banks, that IRN becomes a common index. So IRN is now being implemented across all European countries”.
SWITZERLAND PUBLIC SERVICES MOVE OUT OF MICROSOFT
The Swiss federal government is getting ready to create an open-source and digitally sovereign work environment for thousands of employees, while the Swiss Armed Forces’ Cyber Command is moving fastr to replace Microsoft 365, especially for sensitive tasks.The Swiss Federal Chancellery concluded that an open-source office suite running through a browser could handle essential administrative functions. So, they started rolling out an independently managed office and collaboration platform that will run alongside Microsoft 365. This movement is similar to that of several European administrations.
The proposed platform, OpenDesk, an open-source work platform developed in Germany, and now used by the German administration, covers email, calendars, documents, presentations, telephony, as well as audio and video conferencing.
