Evolution and Perspectives of the Keep IT Secure Ecosystem:A Six-Year Analysis of Cybersecurity Experts Supporting Belgian SMEs

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 2 Apr 2026] Evolution and Perspectives of the Keep IT Secure Ecosystem:A Six-Year Analysis of Cybersecurity Experts Supporting Belgian SMEs Christophe Ponsard, Jean-François Daune, Denis Darquennes, Malik Bouhou, Nicolas Point The importance of cybersecurity for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) has never been greater, especially given the rise of AI-driven threats. Supporting SMEs requires a sustained effort to ensure they have access to resources and expertise covering awareness, protection, auditing, and incident response. Since 2019, our work with the Keep It Secure initiative has focused on helping Belgian (Walloon) SMEs strengthen their cybersecurity posture through access to a network of labelled cybersecurity experts. In this process, we interviewed over 120 professionals from around 90 companies and gathered rich insights about the nature, strengths and weaknesses of our regional ecosystem. While our initiative primarily targets the labelling of cybersecurity experts, we demonstrate increasing alignment with the broader Cyber Fundamentals framework deployed at the federal level in Belgium, which supports official certification. This paper reports on the progress and lessons learned from this long-term effort, highlighting how expert validation, based on a structured evaluation approach, can help improve SME cybersecurity. Comments: Preprint ICISSP 2026 Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2604.02425 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.02425v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.02425 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Christophe Ponsard [view email] [v1] Thu, 2 Apr 2026 18:00:26 UTC (730 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)