This posts marks the beginning of a series dedicated to National Cyber Security Strategies.

Over the last few years the main developed countries, particularly in Europe, North America and the scope of the European Union and NATO, have been publishing their National Cyber Security Strategies. But, What is a National Cyber Security Strategy? A National Cyber Security Strategy is a document that lists the vision of the government of a nation for facing Cyber Security management within the global scope of such nation. Everyone follows the same plan that consists in defining national objectives for managing Cyber Security and lines of action for reaching those objectives during a determined period of time. Definitively a national Cyber security strategy is no more than, in terms that readers of this publication will understand, a Director's Plan for Information Security (or Cyber Security) that covers all institutions, infrastructures, companies and individuals from a determined country.

After analyzing, from the year 2008, the successive national strategies that have been published, about 27 currently, we can see the similarities between the objective and lines of action to be carried out, as well as the structure and proposal of the strategy itself. It follows this format with some small variations:

1. Reason, current state of Cyber Security
2. Objectives to be achieved
3. Lines of action
4. Organization
5. Budget 

Spain has been one of the last countries to publish their National Strategy for Cyber security, toward the end of 2013, and its content is similar to the others:

1. Cyberspace and its security
2. Purpose and main entities governing Cyber Security in Spain
3. Cyber Security Objectives
4. Cyber Security Lines of Action
5. Cyber Security in the National Security System

As we can see it lacks a section on the budget, which is fairly standard, given that 80% of published strategies lack an allocated budget.

In subsequent posts we will further discuss the mentioned aspects and compare them with the strategy published by the Spanish Government