"CISA Releases White Paper Highlighting R&D Needs and Strategic Actions for Enhancing the Resilience of Critical Infrastructure"
The US Homeland Security Department's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has announced the release of the white paper titled "Research, Development, and Innovation for Enhancing Resilience of Cyber-physical Critical Infrastructure: Needs and Strategic Actions," which was developed by the Resilient Investment Planning and Development Working Group (RIPDWG). As stated in the paper, federal research is often sector-specific or interdisciplinary fragmented, making it difficult to effectively mitigate cross-cutting and systemic infrastructure risks. The paper aims to help the federal research enterprise capitalize on the opportunity to make congressionally-funded research more relevant, equitable, accessible, and useful to decision-makers who must address critical infrastructure challenges at the local and regional levels. The paper identifies three significant gaps that call for a more unified, empirical, and user-centered approach to federal Research, Development, and Innovation (RD&I). First, critical services that depend on cyber-physical infrastructure systems require an integrated analysis of the consequences and risk reduction decision factors. There needs to be an understanding of the societal dimensions of enhancing the resilience of cyber-physical infrastructure systems as well as user-engagement in cyber-physical infrastructure research to translate resilience knowledge into effective action. In order to fill the identified RD&I gaps, the paper proposes a dozen strategic actions for implementation by research partners across the federal interagency in collaboration with stakeholders. This article continues to discuss CISA's release of a white paper that highlights RD&I needs and strategic actions for making critical infrastructure more resilient.