Last month saw the official launch of CERT-UK (Computer Emergency Response Team), the organisation tasked with coordinating the nation’s cyber defence efforts. The launch has been met by a widely positive response, and I’m personally glad to see the UK government being proactive in this space.
Following the launch, I’m extremely excited and proud to reveal that we’ve been working closely with CERT-UK over the past few months to develop their website, which also went live to the public on launch day. I was one of the developers working on this project, and from a personal point of view, it has been great for all involved to assist with a project that contributes to the nation’s cyber security strategy. Working for an SME, it’s great to see the Cabinet office engage with a company like ours on such a flagship project. This is very much in accordance with the Government’s ambition to procure a large portion of services from smaller businesses.
Our involvement spanned the entire project lifecycle – from initial scoping / requirements capture, through design iterations and development, to the big release on launch day. Many members of the Surevine team were involved, with my personal involvement focused largely on the development of the website.
From a web development perspective, the project was similar to many others. However, one exception to this was our collaboration with the Government Digital Service (creators of Gov.uk). During the course of the project, the GDS worked alongside us in an advisory capacity to ensure that the website delivered as much value to the end users as possible. As this was an independent website, it was not required to completely adhere to the GDS’ Digital by Default service standard. Nonetheless, we were keen to ensure that the final product was usable, informative and accessible.
This collaboration with the GDS seemed very successful to me, with Surevine able to develop and innovate in a rapid fashion (as SME’s are able to do), and the GDS on hand to lend their experience of similar projects, ensuring that consistency and quality standards were achieved. From a developers point of view it was very interesting to see the expertise they have around the modern web space, and it was good to see that the right aspects (in my opinion) of the project were being questioned / scrutinised when it came to reviews. More broadly, I think its great that the government is taking web development seriously, with the GDS leading the way on producing well-designed web applications that are usable and accessible by a wide audience.
Aside from this collaboration, one of the major successes of the project in my eyes, was our ability to incorporate multiple open source components into the website. Open source software is something that is very important to Surevine (Our ethos), and I commend CERT-UK (and by extension the Cabinet Office) for adopting this approach. The components used included:
I believe that this decision to adopt open source software will pay off over the lifetime of the project (by avoiding vendor lock-in and licensing fees). What’s more, this approach means that CERT-UK are not the only ones to benefit. During the course of the project, we were able to contribute some of the wordpress plugin modifications we made back to the open source community (for the benefit of others), including:
- https://github.com/surevine/contact-form-7
- https://github.com/surevine/simple-social-buttons
These modifications are currently located in Surevine’s Github repositories whilst we await response from each project’s core contributors about a possible merge.
We are planning to share more details about our work on this project soon.