Security@Cisco

Two recent trends have combined to create critical infrastructure, sectors of the economy that provide essential services to businesses and governments:

• Governments have gradually turned to the private sector to provide the bulk of their essential critical infrastructure services, including energy, financial services, communications, water, transportation, and health care.
• These same businesses and governments have migrated many of their core business processes onto information networks and the Internet.

Securing Critical Infrastructure

Protecting critical infrastructure, including privately owned and operated infrastructure, presents challenges and demands close cooperation across public and private sectors. Cisco has created the Critical Infrastructure Assurance Group (CIAG) to support these efforts. CIAG helps organizations ensure delivery of critical services through four program areas:

Workforce Development Helps organizations improve critical infrastructure-assurance education and training.	Research Conducts, sponsors, and identifies prominent research designed to enhance critical infrastructure security and assurance, internationally.
Practices, Policies and Standards Development Helps organizations develop effective practices, policies, and standards that guide critical infrastructure and homeland-security related initiatives.	Incident Response Support Support incident response coordination across Cisco by facilitating information exchange between Cisco response organizations and various external organizations.

Working with industry organizations, government agencies, standards bodies, educational institutions, and individual infrastructure owners and operators, CIAG promotes awareness and offers resources to assure the security of critical infrastructure worldwide.

Cisco is positioned to assume this responsibility because:

• Its products are pervasive across global infrastructures
• Its team of security and networking professionals offers industry expertise and leadership
• Cisco is familiar with interdependencies, the advantages of networking, and security challenges