Office of Infrastructure Protection

Protecting the nation's critical infrastructure and key resources (CIKR) is a key Department of Homeland Security mission established in 2002 by the National Strategy for Homeland Security and the Homeland Security Act.  

The Department's Office of Infrastructure Protection (IP) within the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD) leads the coordinated national program to reduce risks to the nation's CIKR posed by acts of terrorism, and to strengthen national preparedness, timely response, and rapid recovery in the event of an attack, natural disaster, or other emergency.

This is a complex mission. CIKR range from the nation's electric power, food and drinking water to its national monuments, telecommunications and transportation systems, chemical facilities and much more.  The vast majority of national CIKR is privately owned and operated, making public-private partnerships essential to protect CIKR and respond to events.

IP manages mission complexity by breaking it down into three broad areas:

• Identify and analyze threats and vulnerabilities.
• Coordinate nationally and locally through partnerships with both government and private sector entities that share information and resources.
• Mitigate risk and effects (encompasses both readiness and incident response).

Critical infrastructure owners and operators, planners and responders need to know:

• what the specific risks are in their locations and to their industries;
• how to coordinate with others within and across sectors and share vital information; and
• to prepare, protect, and respond.

IP addresses these needs through the National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP).  The NIPP establishes a partnership structure for coordination across 18 CIKR Sectors, and a risk management framework to identify assets, systems, networks and functions whose loss or compromise pose the greatest risk.

The NIPP structure provides a foundation for strengthening disaster response and recovery.  The CIKR Support Annex (PDF, 36 pages - 397 KB) to the National Response Framework (NRF) provides a bridge between the NIPP “steady-state” processes for infrastructure protection and the NRF unified approach to domestic incident management.  These documents provide the overarching doctrine that ensures full integration of the two vital homeland security mission areas – critical infrastructure protection and domestic incident management. 

Within the sector framework, IP works with public and private partners coordinating efforts to protect CIKR and provide CIKR functions to strengthen incident response.  IP initiatives fall into six programmatic areas:

• Partnerships, Outreach, and Training
• Contingency Planning and Incident Management
• Chemical Facility Security and Compliance
• CIKR Protective Security and Field Operations
• Infrastructure Analysis, Research, and Development
• Infrastructure Information Collection and Protection

More about the Office of Infrastructure Protection