As part of Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience Month, WaterISAC is highlighting CISA’s four recommended best practices/strategies that infrastructure organizations can implement to help make them more secure and resilient. Today’s best practice is Know Your Infrastructure and Dependencies.
Understanding your crown jewel assets and potential dependencies on other infrastructure services is crucial to ensure the continuity of your organization’s own operations. To help critical infrastructure organizations with this effort CISA offers multiple free resources. First, CISA’s Infrastructure Resilience Planning Framework (IRPF) helps stakeholders incorporate infrastructure resilience considerations into planning activities. It can be used to support capital improvement plans, hazard mitigation plans, and other planning documents, as well as funding requests. Access the IRPF here.
This summer, CISA released a supplementary product to the IRPF, titled the IRPF Playbook. Designed as a companion to the main IRPF, this Playbook offers users concise instruction and highlights useful resources for accomplishing key actions within each of the five steps for planning for infrastructure resilience and security. The Playbook also includes a narrative hypothetical illustration of how a community might utilize the IRPF to conduct resilience planning or incorporate infrastructure resilience into existing planning efforts IRPF. Access the IRPF Playbook here.
Additionally, CISA’s Infrastructure Dependency Primer (IDP) can help local stakeholders better understand critical infrastructure dependencies, how those dependencies impact community risk and resilience, and how to incorporate that understanding into risk mitigation planning. The IDP is divided into three main modules—Learn, Plan, and Implement—which include videos, informational graphics, and basic instruction on pertinent topics, such as essential community functions, enabling infrastructure systems, dependencies, resilience, stakeholder involvement, plan integration, resilience solutions, and available resources. Access the IDP here or read more at CISA.
