Our UK Technology Strategy: Built Around What the Country Needs

Are you ready to deliver? It's the question the UK's defence and security sector is being asked today.

Built around what you need

The UK faces defence and security threats that are evolving faster and growing more complex by the year. The environment has changed: acquiring and developing technology the traditional way is no longer enough on its own to deliver a lasting edge. That advantage now depends on adaptability, and on a laser focus on what actually moves the needle.

As part of the national enterprise trusted to protect UK society and safeguard its interests, we bring together the best of our own technical capability with SMEs, academia and the wider industry to master the technology building blocks that give the UK a decisive edge. Harnessing the best of global innovation and deepening industrial collaboration with allies makes us stronger together - and, at the same time, localising capability where it matters protects freedom of action, national resilience and long-term prosperity.

We can't afford to stand still. Anticipating what comes next, rapidly developing and integrating new capabilities, and mastering emerging technology faster than adversaries is what gives customers, partners and the nation confidence that we're ready for today's challenges and tomorrow's threats.

The smartest capability gains come from connecting what the UK already owns, to keep us ahead of the threat.

The biggest gains never come from bolting on one more standalone box, or building a closed system for a single milestone. They come from connecting assets, data, software and decisions - so capability keeps improving and stays useful for longer. That's the thinking our technology strategy is built on.

A story of disruption

In the early 1990s, the IT sector was dominated by mainframes - huge, monolithic systems built to last. Then the internet and mobile revolution disrupted that world completely. A new ecosystem emerged, and the organisations that survived weren't the ones that built ever-bigger mainframes; they were the ones that adapted.

Defence and security is approaching the same moment. Today's large, complex platforms are this sector's mainframe: built to endure, but increasingly a liability in an environment that refuses to stand still. Over the next twenty years, technology will disrupt defence the way the internet and mobile disrupted IT - and the organisations that thrive will be the ones that connect what they have today with what comes next, rather than treating either on its own as the answer.

Getting this right takes sustained investment, not a one-off commitment. Thales invests significantly in research and development (€4 billion euros every year), and that investment is concentrated on core technology areas that we believe will define the next generation of defence and security capability.

Six principles, one approach

This is Thales’ Technology Strategy. Our approach to delivering resilience and readiness to UK security and defence. Six principles shape how we design, integrate, assure and evolve capability across Thales in the UK - not six separate boxes to tick, but one way of thinking that should influence the decisions made on every programme. 

Taken together, they describe the technology culture we're building: mission-led, sovereign, digital, trusted, connected, and continuously evolvable. We call the framework behind them Connect. Evolve. Endure.

1: Partner-focused - open, modular and reusable

We design technology around partner needs and mission outcomes, using open and modular approaches that maximise reuse, adaptability and speed to deployment - scaled across multiple standards.

It starts with the partner and the mission outcome, not the technology or programme we happen to be working on. Where we solve a problem, we ask whether that capability can be made modular, open and reusable across other programmes and partners. The shift is from “what does my programme need?” to “how do we create capability that solves the mission and can be used again?”

2: Sovereign and sustainable

We develop solutions that protect sovereign capability and freedom of action in the UK, delivering critical capabilities, resilient supply chains and supporting long-term sustainability.

Sovereignty isn't about owning everything ourselves - it's about knowing where the UK needs the ability to understand, control, assure, adapt and sustain critical capability. That means thinking beyond delivery, to supply chains, skills, dependencies and the ability to support and evolve what we build. The question becomes: can the customer depend on this capability throughout its lifecycle?

3: Digital and data first

We make sure all offers, from the core to the edge, are digitally enabled, data-driven and AI-ready - data sits at the heart of our solutions to drive better decisions, agility and performance.

Digital and data aren't things we add afterwards. Every capability we create considers, from the outset, how data will be generated, secured, shared and exploited - and how AI can improve performance and decision-making. The focus moves from “where can we add AI?” to “have we built the digital and data foundations that let us exploit it?”

4: Secure, safe and resilient by design

We embed security, safety and resilience from the start to deliver trusted performance in demanding, complex, contested and ever-evolving environments.

Trust has to be engineered in - security, safety and resilience can't be bolted on at the end. They need to shape the architecture and the design from the beginning, and that matters more as our systems become more connected, autonomous and software-defined. The question is: can we trust this capability when the environment is complex, contested, and things go wrong?

5: Built for integration and interoperability

We create solutions that connect seamlessly across platforms, partners and missions, enabling interoperability by default rather than by exception.

We assume our technology will need to connect. Our customers operate in ecosystems - across platforms, suppliers, nations and technologies - so we design for interoperability from the start, with open interfaces and architectures that let our technology work as part of a wider mission system. The shift is from “does this work?” to “does this work as part of the system?”

6: Designed for system enhancement and rapid capability insertion

We engineer systems to evolve continuously, enabling rapid integration of new technologies and accelerated delivery of operational capability.

We design for change, because technology and threats are moving too quickly for the systems we deliver today to become fixed end states. We need architectures that let us upgrade, integrate new technologies, and respond to new threats quickly. Success depend on how easily we can make this capability better tomorrow than it is today.

Confidence, by design

None of this matters unless it can be trusted. As our systems become more connected, more autonomous and more software-defined, technology gives people better information - the ability to act faster, at greater scale, and to make better decisions. The ability to be ready.

Frontier technology only matters if it can be trusted. That's the standard our six principles are designed to meet.