Analysis for National Priorities: Tiers 1 and 2
Our nation’s critical infrastructures and key resources are comprised of a multitude of physical, human, and cyber assets both privately and publicly owned. These assets include the buildings, bridges, power lines, river vessels, pipelines, cables, power plants, stadiums, schools, and many other facilities that contribute to our daily life.
NISAC has supported DHS efforts to identify and analyze assets to determine those most essential to national well-being. NISAC analyzes the nation’s assets for significant impacts within and across infrastructure sectors, including consequences to public health and safety as well as direct and cascading costs to the national economy.
Tier 1 assets, referred to as the “crown jewels” of the nation, are the few linchpin facilities, engineered systems, and structures that warrant consideration for significant additional infrastructure investment and protection. Losing or disabling these assets could be crippling. Loss of Tier 2 assets, although not as debilitating, may still have severe consequences, and therefore these assets warrant identification.
In the context of rapid response analysis (typically less than 96 hours), NISAC has, and continues to, review and recommend improvements to criteria and guidelines for Tier 1 and Tier 2 assessments. Also within limited timeframes, NISAC has identified preliminary high consequence asset lists for potential identification as Tier 1.
An important continuing aspect of NISAC’s contribution is defining consistent impact criteria and sector-specific attributes that provide greater fidelity in accurately predicting consequence. NISAC applies these criteria to our infrastructure asset analyses to identify assets of potential value.
All of these efforts help drive protective actions and prioritize investments in a transparent and defensible manner by providing unbiased assessments and subject matter expertise
Looking Forward…
NISAC continues to support the identification of the nation’s critical infrastructure assets by providing analytic support and subject matter expertise to the Homeland Infrastructure Threat and Risk Analysis Center (HITRAC) including:
- Model-based consequence analysis will be performed on a continuing basis to provide quantitative assessments that account for intra- and inter-sector dependencies and other effects from a system of coupled infrastructures.
- NISAC infrastructure expertise will be applied on an asset-by-asset basis to Tier 1 assets to assure that the full consequence of the potential loss of these critical assets is completely understood.
- Methodology development supports the inclusion of vulnerability and other risk information with consequence to better prioritize mitigation measures.
