On 20 October, CoESS Director General Catherine Piana will speak during the opening plenary session on the practical implementation of the NIS2 and CER Directives. Under the deliberately provocative title “Compliant on Paper. Ready in Practice?”, her intervention will question whether regulatory compliance necessarily translates into real operational resilience. Drawing in particular on the recent European Commission Guidelines on the Critical Entities Resilience (CER) Directive, she will explore the gap between having plans, procedures and capabilities on paper – and ensuring that the relevant actors, information, relationships and resources are actually connected and ready to function when a crisis occurs.

This question will be taken further on 21 October, from 11:00 to 12:30, in a dedicated CoESS session: “The Role of Private Security in Safeguarding Critical Infrastructure in the Context of Europe’s Preparedness Union.”

Moderated by Catherine Piana, the session will open with Hans Das, Deputy Director-General and Chief Operations Officer at DG ECHO, European Commission, followed by Marc Léoutre, Deputy Head of Unit, DG HOME D2 – Counter-Terrorism, Anti-Radicalisation and Critical Infrastructure.

The panel will then bring together three complementary operational and strategic perspectives: Jean-Philippe Bérillon, Chairman of the CoESS Critical Infrastructure Protection Committee and Member of the CoESS Board of Directors; Yvan De Mesmaeker, Secretary General of the European Corporate Security Association (ECSA); and Karolien Verbeiren, Country President of Securitas Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg.

At the heart of the discussion will be what CoESS calls the Preparedness Gap: the gap between capabilities and experience that already exist across society and those that are effectively recognised, connected and integrated into preparedness planning before a crisis occurs. The session will ask how Europe can move towards Preparedness by Design, with roles, trusted relationships, information-sharing arrangements and operational interfaces established and exercised beforehand.

Finally, on 22 October, Catherine Piana will join the closing plenary panel, “Systemic Risk and Uneven Resilience: Confronting Europe’s Next Critical Infrastructure Shock.” The discussion will examine persistent resilience gaps across Member States and critical entities, fragmented capabilities, the evolving hybrid threat landscape and the lessons emerging from CER and NIS2 implementation.

CoESS is a supporting organisation of CIPRE 2026, and special discounted registration rates are available to CoESS members. Members interested in attending are invited to reach out directly to Catherine Piana to obtain the CoESS discount code.