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As a result of Viatel Cyber’s comprehensive expertise, Belfast City Airport became one of the first airports in the UK to successfully achieve CAF compliance.

About Belfast City Airport

Belfast City Airport is one of Northern Ireland’s key transport hubs, serving over two million passengers annually. With a strong commitment to operational excellence and passenger safety, the airport has long prioritised robust infrastructure and forward-thinking technology solutions.

The Customer Requirement

In today’s landscape, organisations across every industry face increasing cyber threats that can disrupt operations, damage reputations, and compromise customer trust. Recognising these risks, Belfast City Airport took a proactive approach to partner with Cybit Cyber, now Viatel Cyber, to strengthen its cybersecurity posture and ensure ongoing compliance with the UK’s evolving regulatory landscape, particularly the Network and Information Systems (NIS) Directive and the Cyber Assessment Framework (CAF). Understanding the importance of trusted expertise to navigate this complex environment, Belfast City Airport appointed Viatel Cyber as its strategic partner to elevate cybersecurity maturity across critical areas, safeguarding and futureproofing operations.

Resilience in Practise- The Result

Thanks to Viatel Cyber’s extensive expertise, Belfast City Airport became one of the UK’s pioneering airports to successfully attain CAF compliance. The organisation now benefits from:

· A mature cybersecurity framework aligned with CAA and NIS standards

· Enhanced visibility and control over privileged access and third-party interactions

· Real-time threat detection and response capabilities

· A resilient incident management strategy embedded across all departments

This transformation went beyond compliance. Belfast City Airport now operates with real-time visibility of digital environments, secure control of privileged access and a culture of cyber awareness embedded across all departments. The airports leadership in achieving CAF compliance has set a new standard for resilience within the UK transport sector.

The Viatel Cyber Solution

The Belfast City Airport team understood that NIS and CAF compliance is not a one-off exercise, it’s a strategic journey that requires careful planning and phased implementation. From the outset, Viatel Cyber worked with Belfast City Airport to design a multi-year roadmap that would enable the airport to continue to meet regulatory requirements in line with prescribed timelines, while strengthening their cybersecurity maturity. This approach allowed time for procedures and policies to be thoughtfully laid out, implemented, and embedded into the organisation’s cyber awareness culture. Beginning with maturity assessments and progressing through technical deployments, policy development, and cultural change, each layer of governance, risk management, technical controls, and incident response was introduced in a structured and sustainable way.

The success of this project was due to a phased approach with a number of objectives:

Objective A- Governance, Risk and Compliance

The initial phase focused on enhancing organisational culture and embedding cybersecurity across all departments. Viatel Cyber supported the team in developing a comprehensive asset management strategy, ensuring all hardware, software, firmware, and information assets were identified and logged. Supply chain management was also addressed, with a strong emphasis on people and process-driven improvements.

Objective B-Technical Controls and Identity Management

Viatel Cyber implemented several key technologies to bolster the airport’s security architecture:

· F5 Access Policy Manager: To centrally control and secure user access to applications and networks, ensuring reliable, identity-based, and policy-driven access.

· Palo Alto Firewalls: Replaced legacy systems to provide advanced threat protection and network segmentation, which improved perimeter security.

· QRadar SIEM Solution: Deployed to centralise log collection and security monitoring across the airport’s infrastructure, which achieved continuous visibility and threat response.

Objective C- Security Monitoring

The introduction of the QRadar SIEM solution provided real-time visibility across Belfast City Airport’s critical systems, allowing the security team to detect and respond to potential threats swiftly. By correlating data from multiple sources, the solution improved situational awareness and reduced the time to identify suspicious activity. This deployment was supported by process enhancements and targeted staff training to ensure alerts were triaged and investigated

effectively. Together, these improvements enabled the airport to move from reactive monitoring to a proactive, intelligence-led approach to cybersecurity.

Objective D- Incident Management and Business Continuity 

Viatel Cyber worked closely with the airport to develop new policies, procedures, and disaster recovery runbooks. These resources ensured that all departments—from IT to HR and communications—were prepared to respond to incidents in a coordinated and compliant manner.

Viatel Cyber’s approach combined strategic consultancy with hands-on engineering. The project began with two Cybersecurity Maturity Assessments (CSMAs), which identified gaps and informed a multi-year roadmap. Viatel Cyber’s embedded engineer at Belfast City Airport played a pivotal role in delivering and maintaining technical solutions on-site.

The airport’s journey was guided by Viatel Cyber’s deep regulatory insight, drawn from our consultant’s direct involvement with the Northern Ireland Competent Authority as advisors and assessors on the implementation of CAF across operators of essential services

Learn More

To discover how Viatel Cyber can help your organisation achieve cybersecurity excellence, contact us at secure@viatel.com.