Midlands Engine Chairman, Sir John Peace, opens new cyber intelligence centre as part of region’s growing leadership in the tech sector

Midlands Engine Chairman Sir John Peace joined Lincolnshire-based KyrptoKloud to officially open their new offices – celebrating the growing momentum in tech and digital innovation across the Midlands.

Speaking at KryptoKloud, Sir John Peace, Chairman of the Midlands Engine, said: “The Midlands is a region that’s seizing the opportunities of a new age, home to exceptional ingenuity, ambition and enterprise. In our region, we’re surrounded by stories of Midlands solutions – solutions that help us to tackle the thorniest challenges faced across the UK and around the globe. The monitoring and detection services provided at Cyber Intelligence centres such as KryptoKloud are important facilities for the Midlands and beyond, and vital to our region’s continued growth and prosperity.”

KryptoKloud is part of a string of exciting digital success stories across the region, with the Midlands becoming a key player in the tech sector. Recent public sector projects with the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport have focused on delivering much-needed digital infrastructure to rural areas in our region – and are part of the urgent need to drive connectivity and address historic regional under-investment in digital. These include the accelerated roll-out of Project Gigabit across, which aims to connect the hardest-to-reach homes and businesses in our region.

The Midlands is also now home to the UK’s first 5G factory trial to be held by Worcester Bosch and Yamazaki Mazak – a landmark step towards creating smart factories in the UK.

In addition, and also in collaboration with the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, along with mobile operators, local authority partners, Ordnance Survey, universities and partners WM5G, the Midlands Engine partnership has created the country’s most comprehensive regional Digital Connected Map.

The map provides an in-depth view into public assets, broadband, 4G, 5G and fibre + gigabit connections – giving an unprecedented picture of current coverage (and lack of) and where services are needed most, to pinpoint the exact areas needed for investment in driving both connectivity and wider regional economic prosperity.

In January, Midlands Engine also convened expert regional partners for its Digital Conference with the aim to level up regional digital connectivity in support of economic prosperity across the whole of the Midlands. Hosted in partnership with HSBC UK, the event featured insights from Minister for Media, Data and Digital Infrastructure, Julia Lopez MP, as well as representatives from BT Openreach, CityFibre, the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, local authorities and leading Midlands universities on how best to drive the digital agenda in the Midlands.

More widely, over 280,000 people are employed directly in the digital sector across the Midlands Engine (6% of total employment) across 20,000 enterprises (5.3% of total) generating £10.6bn of GVA (4.3% of total). Vibrant tech communities have been established across the region over the last ten years and in 2021 alone, over 769,656 jobs for digital roles were posted, of which over 120,000 were unique. Reflecting the heightened demand for digital roles, advertised salaries in 2021 were 6.8% higher than in March 2020 and 14.6% higher than the long-run average.

The growth of our digital and technology sectors forecast a promising future for our region, and Midlands Engine remains committed to supporting our private and public sector partners, such as KryptoKloud, as we look to further deliver the digital technologies and infrastructure which are an essential part of the levelling up agenda.

For more information on KyryptoKloud, visit the website.