# What is Critical Infrastructure Protection?

> Critical infrastructure protection is the coordinated use of physical security, cybersecurity, personnel safeguards, emergency management, and resilience measures to reduce risks to assets, systems, networks, and services whose disruption could seriously harm safety, health, security, the economy, or society.

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## Content

What qualifies as critical infrastructure depends on jurisdiction, sector, function, and formal designation.

Protection must address deliberate attacks, accidents, equipment failure, natural hazards, and dependencies across energy, communications, water, transport, digital services, supply chains, and other essential functions. Priorities should follow service consequences, not merely asset count or replacement cost.

### Key points

- **Understand essential functions:** Identify services, minimum delivery, critical assets and people, dependencies, single points of failure, geographic concentration, and consequences for communities and other sectors.
- **Reduce multiple hazards:** Combine physical barriers, access control, secure engineering, monitoring, maintenance, supplier controls, workforce preparation, emergency procedures, and risk-informed upgrades.
- **Build response and resilience:** Establish coordination, communications, alternate operations, tested recovery priorities, mutual assistance, exercises, and decision authority that preserve safety during disruption.
- **Important limitation:** A sector label, regulatory designation, or checklist does not prove protection or resilience. Requirements vary by jurisdiction, and securing one asset can shift risk or create safety consequences elsewhere.

### Related terms

[North American Electric Reliability Corporation Critical Infrastructure Protection (NERC CIP)](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/north-american-electric-reliability-corporation-critical-infrastructure-protection/>) · [Operational technology (OT) security](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/operational-technology-security/>) · [Cyber resilience](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/cyber-resilience/>) · [Business continuity](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/business-continuity/>) · [Supply-chain security](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/supply-chain-security/>)

### Sources

[CISA, Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience](https://www.cisa.gov/topics/critical-infrastructure-security-and-resilience) · [CISA, Infrastructure Dependency Primer](https://www.cisa.gov/topics/critical-infrastructure-security-and-resilience/resilience-services/infrastructure-dependency-primer/learn) · [European Union, Directive (EU) 2022/2557 on the Resilience of Critical Entities](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2022/2557/oj/eng) · [NERC, Critical Infrastructure Protection Reliability Standards](https://www.nerc.com/standards/reliability-standards/cip)

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