GUEST COLUMN:
Leanne Davies
Principal Lecturer in Cyber Security and Computing, Wrexham University
Cluster Manager, Cyber Wales
In Wales, we’re fortunate to have something truly special: a cyber ecosystem that isn’t fragmented, but connected. At the heart of that is Cyber Wales, a platform that doesn’t just host conversations, it enables real collaboration between universities, government, industry, and innovators.
This kind of collaboration is more than just a nice idea. In cybersecurity, it’s absolutely essential.
One of the most valuable things Cyber Wales has achieved is bringing together every university in the country into one shared network. That’s incredibly rare. We’re not working in silos, duplicating effort or guarding our knowledge, quite the opposite. We're sharing insight, building research partnerships, and, most importantly, creating opportunities for students to step into the real world of cyber.
Cybersecurity is not a subject you can truly teach from behind a lectern. It’s hands-on, fast-changing, and deeply technical. Students don’t want to sit and listen to a theory-heavy lecture, they want to understand the tools, the techniques, and the threats they’ll face in practice. And that’s exactly where Cyber Wales has made a difference: it brings the classroom and the real world closer together.
Today, students in Wales aren’t just learning about cyber, they’re doing it. Through Cyber Wales, companies reach out directly to universities like ours with real problems, real projects, and real opportunities. I’ve had industry partners contact me to say: “We’ve hit a wall with this issue. Can we work with your students? Can we co-design a solution with your team?”
And the answer is always: yes.
This has transformed the student experience. At Wrexham University alone, our department is currently collaborating with seven or eight companies on live cyber projects. These aren’t just internships, they’re deep, technical, academic-industry partnerships. Students gain hands-on keyboard experience. Companies gain access to emerging talent. And the knowledge flows both ways.
This kind of collaboration wouldn’t happen without a unifying structure. That’s what Cyber Wales offers. It dissolves barriers, between institutions, between academia and industry, and between education and innovation. It means companies can talk to universities easily. It means students can meet real practitioners at networking events. And it means government can shape policy informed by both grassroots innovation and academic insight.
We’ve reached a point where the line between academia and industry is more blurred than ever before, and I say that as a positive. Because the cyber skills gap is very real. Industry needs people who are job-ready: graduates who don’t just understand the theory, but can hit the ground running with technical capability and critical thinking.
Cyber Wales helps us produce those kinds of graduates. And it does so by enabling relationships, not just between people, but between entire sectors of the economy.
The Welsh cyber community is small enough to be personal and collaborative, yet big enough to be ambitious. That’s a unique position and one we should continue to build on. Because when we bring together minds from education, business, government, and research, we don’t just share knowledge.
We build a safer, stronger, and smarter Wales.
