ENX ASSOCIATION — THE TRUST ANCHOR

Founded in 2000, ENX Association is an organization consisting of automobile manufacturers, suppliers and four national automotive associations. The aim is to enable and simplify secure and trustworthy collaboration over industrial value-added networks.

With its association structure, ENX is the initiator and governing body of common standards and inter-operable services that are based on these standards. ENX acts as a neutral governance and escalation authority as well as a driver of ongoing development for the users.

COMPETITION AND MONITORING

The providers that make the solutions available to the users must be in competition with each other. For this purpose, ENX Association certifies or approves service providers according to technical criteria catalogues and concludes contracts that allow governance.

ENX Association, based in Paris and Frankfurt, has been established as a trust anchor for industrial solutions. It is an example of trusting and successful cooperation in the European automotive industry. Central security mechanisms are fully governed from Germany and France.

DIGITALIZATION REQUIRES STANDARDS

Protecting business processes and information is a core task of the management in any industry. The challenges specific to the European automotive industry are obvious. Concerning economic espionage, the industry faces the same threats as when ENX Association was founded in 2000.

Digitization, Industry 4.0 and the connected car lead to new requirements for information security, data protection and the trustworthiness of solutions — for automotive manufacturers just as much as for automotive suppliers.

The automotive industry is characterized by strong international cooperation and cross-company business processes. This requires all involved parties to ensure a comparable level of protection. Protecting own infrastructure is already challenging. Cross-company concepts often fail due to complexity or lead to expensive stand-alone solutions. To be usable across the entire industry, solutions have to

• reduce the complexity arising from an individual company's various connections with third parties
• be recognized as trustworthy by all partners beyond fulfilling the technical requirements objectively
• be open to enable competition among providers.