DHS Reaches Milestone for Critical U.S. Infrastructure Protection
July 3, 2007 // Published as a news service by IHS
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the completion of 17 sector-specific plans (SSPs) in support of the National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP).
The SSPs are the culmination of a national planning effort that began nearly five years ago with implementation of Homeland Security Presidential Directive 7.
The directive identified critical infrastructure and key resource (CI/KR) sectors requiring protective actions to prepare for, or mitigate against, a terrorist attack or other hazard.
While the NIPP provides an overall architecture for safeguarding the nation's critical infrastructure, the SSPs create a comprehensive risk management framework to establish national priorities, goals and requirements. The SSPs serve as a roadmap for how infrastructure sector stakeholders are implementing measures to reduce risk and strengthen security.
Each SSP establishes a sector-specific risk-reduction consultative network to exchange best practices and facilitate rapid information sharing among federal, state, local and tribal governments, as well as private sector business and industry.
Sectors addressed by the SSPs include:
- Agriculture and food.
- Banking and finance.
- Chemical.
- Commercial facilities.
- Commercial nuclear reactors.
- Dams.
- Defense industrial.
- Drinking water and water treatment systems.
- Emergency services.
- Energy.
- Government facilities.
- Information technology.
- National monuments and icons.
- Postal and shipping.
- Public health and health care.
- Telecommunications.
- Transportation systems.
Many of these sector stakeholders have been key contributors to the initiatives of the American National Standards Institute Homeland Security Standards Panel (ANSI-HSSP), a partnership between the public and private sectors to identify, promote and accelerate adoption of consensus standards critical to homeland security.
Other ANSI-HSSP deliverables address perimeter security, enterprise power security, biological and chemical threat agents, emergency preparedness and business continuity and training programs for first-responders, among other critical national security issues.
Source: American National Standards Institute (ANSI).