Infrastructure is the backbone of communities, providing critical services and enabling essential functions such as health, safety, and economic growth. Understanding critical infrastructure dependencies and incorporating them into planning is key to the resilience of communities across the nation. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced Friday the Infrastructure Dependency Primer (IDP), developed to help state, local, tribal, and territorial planners and decisionmakers better understand how infrastructure dependencies can impact community risk and resilience and how to incorporate that knowledge into ongoing community planning. The IDP is a supplement to CISA’s recently published Infrastructure Resilience Planning Framework (IRPF).
The IDP provides animations, interactive graphics, and guidance to address fundamental questions users may have regarding infrastructure, dependencies, and resilience planning, such as:
- What are infrastructure dependencies and why should I care?
- What is resilience, how does it relate to dependencies, and how do I plan for it?
- What resources are there to help me reduce dependency risks and enhance the resilience of my community?
The IDP is organized into three main sections, which provide basic instruction on important topics:
- LEARN: Essential community functions, enabling infrastructure systems, and infrastructure dependencies
- PLAN: Resilience, the role of infrastructure stakeholders in planning processes, and methods for incorporating dependencies into planning
- IMPLEMENT: Actions for improving resilience, case study examples, and available resources
This IDP is publicly accessible and meant to be independently explored by users based on their interests and needs. No prerequisite training or knowledge is needed to benefit from IDP content. Increase your infrastructure dependency understanding today at cisa.gov/idp.
For more information on infrastructure resilience planning and assessment, visit CISA.gov/idr-program.
