JAG Secure is now a member of ADS Group.

Who ADS are

ADS is the trade association representing the United Kingdom’s aerospace, defence, security and space industries. It was formed in 2009 from the merger of the Society of British Aerospace Companies, the Defence Manufacturers Association and the Association of Police and Public Security Suppliers.

It represents well over seventeen hundred member organisations, from Airbus, BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce down through the supply chain, and more than ninety per cent of its membership are small and medium sized enterprises. Its subsidiary, Farnborough International, runs the Farnborough International Airshow. The Ministry of Defence engages with it regularly as one of the principal industry voices in defence procurement.

The sectors it covers added tens of billions to the UK economy last year and employ close to four hundred and fifty thousand people.

Why this one matters more than most

Trade body membership is easy to collect and easy to overstate. This one is different, for a specific reason.

Defence, aerospace and space supply chains have a security problem that is structural rather than technical. The primes at the top are hard targets with mature security functions and significant budgets. The organisations underneath them, the ninety per cent that are SMEs, frequently are not. An attacker who wants access to a programme does not attack the prime. They attack the machine shop three tiers down that holds the drawings.

That is not a hypothetical. It is the dominant pattern in supply chain compromise, and it is why the requirements flowing down from the MOD have tightened so considerably. Suppliers who never previously had to evidence their security posture now do, and many of them have no idea where to start.

This is exactly the work JAG Secure does, and exactly the kind of organisation that has historically been underserved by testing providers, because a supplier with thirty staff is too small to interest a large consultancy and too regulated to be safely ignored.

Data sovereignty is not a marketing line here

There is one more reason this membership fits.

For most clients, the commitment that data stays in the United Kingdom on locally controlled infrastructure is reassuring. For defence and aerospace suppliers it is frequently a hard requirement, written into the contract they hold with the tier above them. Where testing evidence goes, who can reach it and which jurisdiction it sits in is a question they have to answer, not a preference they hold.

JAG Secure was built that way from the start, before any client asked for it. It is not something bolted on to win defence work.

What we expect from it

Access to the sector, the working groups, and the organisations trying to work out what the new requirements mean for them in practice. Membership does not confer any accreditation and it is not a substitute for one. What it does is put a specialist testing consultancy inside the community it intends to serve.