Author Archives: Wayne Horkan

About Wayne Horkan

I’m a technologist and engineer, typically working in enterprise architecture and systems engineering.

Cyber Security Skills in the UK Labour Market 2025: A Critical Analysis

This article critically examines the Cyber Security Skills in the UK Labour Market 2025 report, highlighting strengths, weaknesses, and regional implications. It synthesises the findings into a practitioner-academic analysis, with recommendations for aligning graduate supply, employer demand, and future skills in areas such as AI and cyber resilience.

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Unlocking the UK’s Growth Potential: A Critical and Constructive Review of the Tech Nation Report 2025

The Tech Nation Report 2025 reaffirms the UK’s position as Europe’s leading tech hub, valued at $1.2 trillion and home to 163 unicorns. Yet it also exposes structural barriers, capital bottlenecks, talent shortages, regional imbalances, and over-reliance on London and AI. This article critically reviews the report, adds practitioner-led insights, and proposes a roadmap for sustainable and regionally inclusive growth.

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Pre-Launch Reflections: The West Midlands Cyber Hub

The pre-launch of the West Midlands Cyber Hub at Enterprise Wharf brought together over 100 leaders from across the region’s cyber ecosystem, CISOs, CTOs, startups, universities, government, community partners, students, practitioners, and members of the interested public. What began as a vision to give the West Midlands a proper home for cyber has now become real, supported by DSIT, Innovate UK, Aston University, West Midlands Cyber Resilience Centre, Midlands Cyber, TechWM and the Innovation Alliance for the West Midlands.

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Breaking Into the Defence & Critical Infrastructure Cyber Supply Chain

Security clearances. Procurement portals. Legacy gatekeepers. Here’s how cyber vendors and professionals gain access to the UK’s most protected sectors. Selling into the UK’s defence, energy, transport, and national infrastructure sectors is not like selling into commercial enterprises. The barriers to entry are higher, the procurement cycles are longer, but the opportunities are vast and durable. Whether you’re a startup with a novel capability or a professional looking to work in high-trust environments, this guide explains how to navigate the real routes into defence and critical national infrastructure (CNI) supply chains.

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From Policy to Place: Aligning the UK Cyber Policy with the West Midlands Futures Growth Plan

The UK Cyber Policy 2025 and the West Midlands Futures Green Paper 2025 set bold agendas but risk gaps without practitioner-led delivery. The national policy offers ambition but lacks continuity, metrics, and practitioner voice. The regional plan lays strong scaffolding but underweights cyber, leaning too heavily on AI. A ten-point roadmap shows the way forward: formally recognise cyber as a standalone cluster, unify governance, foster community, attract investment, establish a hub, launch a festival, rebuild narrative, reform SME funding access, enhance talent strategy, and create a regional benchmarking index. Anchored in the West Midlands Cyber Hub, this approach can balance national ambition with regional delivery, making resilience a driver of inclusive growth.

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The West Midlands Futures Green Paper (2025): Synopsis, Key Takeaways, Critique, and Recommendations

The West Midlands Futures Green Paper sets a bold agenda, but risks leaning too heavily on AI. Cyber must be treated as a foundational enabler across every sector, from advanced manufacturing to healthcare, and anchored in a practitioner-led West Midlands Cyber Hub. Such a hub can drive assurance, skills conversion, supply-chain uplift, and regional equity, ensuring growth is both resilient and inclusive.

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UK Cyber at a Crossroads: Three Essays on Policy, Practice, and Growth, in Reaction to the 2025 Cyber Growth Action Plan

The UK’s cyber policy has made progress but suffers from churn, overlap, and regional imbalance. The 2025 Cyber Policy sets out ambition but lacks continuity and practitioner voice. This three-part series traces the history, critiques the new policy, and argues for a practitioner-led, regionally balanced ecosystem to stabilise the base finally.

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Stabilising the Base: From Patchwork to Platform in the UK Cyber Ecosystem

This article argues that stabilisation must be the UK’s priority. Drawing together the lessons of history and the critique of the DSIT Cyber Growth Action Plan 2025, it calls for a practitioner-led ecosystem that ends programme churn, addresses regional imbalance, unlocks university IP, and resists government attempts to build commercial products. The vision is of hubs and networks rooted in delivery and credibility — a cyber base resilient enough to sustain long-term growth. Unless these foundations are secured, the UK will remain trapped in cycles of ambition without durability.

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Reviewing the 2025 UK Cyber Growth Action Plan: Promise, Blind Spots, and the Challenge of Continuity

This article, written in reaction to the DSIT Cyber Growth Action Plan 2025, reviews and critiques the government’s new approach. It recognises what the policy gets right — framing resilience as growth, creating safe havens, and calling for a one-team response — but also highlights what is missing: metrics, continuity, practitioner voice, and regional balance. Without these, the new policy risks becoming rhetoric rather than a platform for real progress. Unless the UK moves decisively from aspiration to delivery, the 2025 Cyber Growth Action Plan will join its predecessors as another missed opportunity.

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A Potted History of the UK’s Cyber Economy: From Secrecy to Sector

This article, written in reaction to the DSIT Cyber Growth Action Plan 2025, traces the uneven history of the UK’s cyber economy. From CESG’s secretive assurance role to NCSC’s public authority and DSIT’s contested remit, the story is one of incremental gains but persistent churn. Programmes such as Cyber Essentials, CyberFirst, CyberASAP, Cyber Runway, and Cyber Resilience Centres have delivered value but lacked continuity, scale, and coherence. Unless the government commits to stabilisation and long-term delivery, the UK will continue to recycle initiatives rather than build a durable cyber base.

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How to Join a Government Working Group (Without Being a Civil Servant)

Yes, you can shape UK cyber policy, even from the outside. Here’s how people get in. Government working groups in the UK might seem closed-off, formal rooms filled with civil servants, consultants, and institutional insiders. But increasingly, government departments are seeking outside voices: founders, engineers, researchers, and community leaders who bring real-world experience. Whether you’re trying to influence cyber skills policy, secure-by-design standards, or public-sector procurement, joining the right working group can amplify your voice and build visibility for your organisation or sector. This article breaks down how non-civil servants are contributing to cyber and tech policy via working groups, what types exist, and how you can get involved.

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Databricks vs Snowflake vs Microsoft Fabric: Positioning the Future of Enterprise Data Platforms

This article extends the Databricks vs Snowflake comparison to include Microsoft Fabric, exploring the platforms’ philosophical roots, architectural approaches, and strategic trade-offs. It positions Fabric not as a direct competitor but as a consolidation play for Microsoft-centric organisations, and introduces Microsoft Purview as the governance layer that unifies divergent estates. Using a real-world scenario where Databricks underpins engineering, Fabric drives BI adoption, and functional teams risk fragmentation, the piece outlines the “Build–Consume–Govern” model and a phased transition plan. The conclusion emphasises orchestration across platforms, not choosing a single winner, as the path to a governed, AI-ready data estate.

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The Cars That Ate Paris promo photo

The Cars That Ate Paris: The Census Website that Swore at Grannies

The 1901 Census website was meant to showcase British digitisation, but instead it became a punchline: servers that buckled on launch, mismatched kit lashed together, prisoner-typed data laced with obscenities, and retired “10 till 3 grannies” and neurodiverse consultants cleaning up the mess. I was called in to write the report that unravelled the fiasco, a job that took me from QinetiQ’s “Santa in tweed” CTO to the Cabinet Office, where I first crossed paths with Alan Mather, and learned hard lessons about hubris, engineering, and failure, along the way.

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From Startups to Scaleups: The UK’s Cyber Commercialisation Ladder, Explained

How Britain takes a cyber idea from academic paper to procurement-ready product, and who’s involved at each step. The UK has quietly built one of the world’s most interconnected cyber innovation ecosystems, a ladder of support that helps researchers, entrepreneurs, and early-stage companies turn ideas into commercial products, funding rounds, and contracts. But it’s not always obvious how it works, who owns which stage, or what the unwritten rules are. This article breaks down the UK’s cyber commercialisation journey, from research spinouts to public sector procurement, and highlights the critical programmes, accelerators, and gatekeepers at each level.

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CyberFirst Celebration in the West Midlands: Reflections on What Makes Cyber Special

A reflection on the CyberFirst Celebration in the West Midlands, marking its transition to TechFirst. The event highlighted achievements, explored what makes cyber unique, and underlined the importance of maintaining the sector’s distinctive strengths, especially its uniquely inquisitive culture, as the programme broadens.

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My Years at Sun Microsystems: From Dream Job to Oracle Redundancy

A memoir of nine years at Sun Microsystems, from the revelation of “The Network is the Computer” and parachuting into nasty projects, to the culture of contrarianism, the pressures of leadership, press training in Nice, and the slow decline into redundancies that culminated with Oracle’s takeover. It closes with reflections on philosophy, craft, people, and the enduring value of diversity and neurodiversity in engineering.

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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Ian Dunmore’s Punk Ethos in Government IT

A personal reflection on my friendship with Ian Dunmore and the rise and fall of Public Sector Forums, exploring how his punk, do-it-yourself ethos created a space for civil servants to speak truth to power, and why those edges still matter today. Follow-up articles will touch on some of the hijinks he got me into (I got myself into), like being sacked and reinstated from my dream job, all within one day.

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Same As It Ever Was: Microsoft’s Office 365 Trap And Why Industrial Email Users Are Being Let Down

Microsoft is undermining Outlook’s role as the backbone of professional communication by forcing heavy users through the Office 365 funnel. Add-ins like MailMaestro, Copilot, and Boomerang are locked away, the product line is fragmented across multiple Outlook clients, and serious multi-inbox management is ignored. Rivals such as Spark, Canary, Mailbird, Superhuman, and even newer “hip” tools like Hey! show more imagination. The lost promise of Google Wave reminds us that integration, not fragmentation, is the real opportunity, while Microsoft’s current short-sighted strategy leaves it weaker than ever. Email remains the killer app of the internet, so why, after all this time, is it still so shite?

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Cyber Clusters and Regional Powerbases: Influence Beyond London

From Cheltenham to Belfast, regional ecosystems are quietly shaping the future of UK cybersecurity. When people think of UK cybersecurity, they often picture Whitehall meetings or Canary Wharf boardrooms. But real influence increasingly lies outside London, in regional clusters, civic innovation groups, and place-based partnerships that combine skills, startups, and strategy into powerful local ecosystems. These clusters aren’t just delivering training or running meetups. They are shaping national policy, securing investment, and building sovereign capabilities in collaboration with local government, academia, and industry. This article maps out the regional powerbases transforming the UK’s cybersecurity landscape, and how to engage with them.

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West Midlands Cyber Hub Diaries: Day One (Or Perhaps Day Sixty)

The West Midlands Cyber Hub marks a long-held ambition to give the region a central home for cyber. Building on the rebooted West Midlands Cyber Working Group (WM CWG), the Hub is designed to strengthen community coherence, increase investment, and connect students, SMEs, enterprises, and universities in a neutral space. Supported by DSIT, Innovate UK, Aston University, TechWM, and the Innovation Alliance for the West Midlands, the Hub will open its first phase at Enterprise Wharf in Birmingham, forming the core of a hub-and-spoke model across the region. The project team, led by Sevgi Aksoy and I (Wayne Horkan), with Rebecca Robinson as PM, is preparing for a pre-launch event on 30th September 2025.

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