NCSC Annual Review 2026

Over the last decade, international partnerships have become increasingly central to how the NCSC delivers its mission. What began as an important enabler to advance our objectives has evolved into a critical source of operational impact, collective influence and strategic advantage. The Five Eyes partnership remains the cornerstone of this approach, providing a uniquely trusted and operationally integrated framework for sharing insight, coordinating action and strengthening collective cyber resilience. Alongside this, our broader network of international partners has grown in both breadth and significance, bringing together governments, international organisations and industry.

International partnerships make it possible to translate lessons, expertise and experience into collective action, helping to strengthen resilience across interconnected systems, services and infrastructure. In doing so, partners can achieve outcomes at scale and pace.

In practice, this means using trusted partnerships to better understand, and collectively harden, the resilience of the critical infrastructure, digital services and supply chains, reducing the risk that disruption cascades across sectors or borders.  

In an increasingly unstable geopolitical environment, we must recognise that we do not have the luxury of time. Any conflict we face tomorrow will be shaped by how well we prepare today. We must proactively share lessons, experiences and preparedness activities, strengthening collective readiness before periods of crisis and conflict emerge.

Beyond critical systems and infrastructure, we should align around common baseline expectations for cyber security, stimulate demand for secure products and services, and strengthen the ecosystem that delivers them. Through coordinated action against those that seek to cause harm, partners can help create a digital environment in which secure and resilient behaviours become the norm rather than the exception. 

This is increasingly important because cyber resilience and economic resilience are now closely linked. Strengthening digital trust, reducing systemic vulnerability and improving resilience across global supply chains can help support growth, investment and long-term prosperity.

Together, we can ensure that security is built into the foundations of the digital ecosystem, addressing whole classes of vulnerability before they are propagated across the technologies, services and infrastructure. 

In practice, this means making secure-by-design the default expectation for future technologies. We continue to manage the consequences of security not being built in from the outset, making it more important that future technologies are developed differently. By shaping the standards, frameworks and security expectations that define good security practice, and driving their adoption at scale, we can help embed security more deeply across the technology ecosystem. 

It also means focusing effort on the shared technologies that underpin vast parts of the digital environment, including cloud platforms and open source ecosystems, where even small improvements can strengthen security across thousands of organisations simultaneously. Together, we can accelerate the adoption of technologies and architectures that address the source of potential vulnerabilities. We need to create the market conditions in which security becomes a defining characteristic of successful technologies, making security a source of competitive advantage and raising expectations across the wider ecosystem. Future digital foundations should be secure by design, not secured retrospectively. 

Technological transformation will sit at the heart of cyber security's evolution over the coming decade. Future advantage will increasingly depend on our ability to understand technological change early and anticipate its implications before it becomes embedded in technology and services. Security cannot remain a response to technologies that have already been adopted at scale. The goal is not simply to keep pace with technological change, but to shape that change to ensure each wave of innovation leaves the digital environment more secure than the one before it. 

AI is the clearest example today of a technology transformation that is reshaping the digital environment on a global scale. We are already experiencing the profound impact of AI on how vulnerabilities are identified, how systems are defended and how malicious actors operate. The development of the world's first AI security standard through ETSI demonstrated how trusted partners can influence the security foundations of transformative technologies whilst they are still evolving, rather than attempting to retrofit them later. 

The long-term impact of AI is still unfolding across societies, economies and national security, creating both opportunities and challenges that are not yet fully understood. The partnerships that help us respond to the realities of AI today will help determine how successfully we navigate and shape the technological transformations that follow. 

Partnerships are no longer just a means of sharing information or coordinating activity.

They are increasingly the mechanism through which nations shape the future digital environment itself. Maintaining and strengthening these partnerships will remain central to the NCSC's mission in the years ahead.