This November the UK is marking Critical Infrastructure Security Month (CISM) for the first time, and we are doing so alongside our key allies Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States of America.

CISM is an opportunity for us to highlight the importance of boosting resilience among our critical national infrastructure (CNI): the infrastructure and systems that we cannot live without. CNI resilience is fundamental to the functioning of our society. This includes clean drinking water, reliable IT networks, the provision of energy, access to healthcare and our emergency services.

Resilience is a whole-of-society effort, where everyone must play a part. By working with our international partners, we are strengthening our work to address the threats to our CNI, minimising disruption wherever possible.

Our CNI landscape has changed significantly in recent years. We are more aware than ever of the role cyber systems play in our everyday lives and, therefore, work within and outside government is carried out to strengthen the resilience of cyber CNI.  

In September, the government designated data infrastructure as a CNI subsector within the wider Communications sector. Through the CNI framework and closer partnership between government and industry, data housed and processed in UK data centres is less likely to be compromised during outages, cyber attacks, and adverse weather events. This puts data centres and cloud providers on an equal footing as water, energy and emergency services systems and will mean that data centres sector can now expect greater government support in anticipating and responding to critical incidents, giving the industry greater reassurance when setting up business in the UK and helping generate economic growth for all.

The resilience of our CNI is fundamental to this government’s missions: their success must rest on resilient foundations. That is why we work across government and with industry and devolved governments to ensure our CNI is as resilient as possible. Our constant close working with our international partners, highlighted during CISM, is also a core part of this endeavour.

Through this work, we also collaborate with the National Cyber Security Centre and the National Protective Security Authority. They provide a wealth of resources that are available to UK businesses to help them bolster their cyber and physical resilience. We encourage all organisations to look at these resources and test their resilience. NCSC’s resources can be found here: Guidance & resources and NPSA’s can be found here: Physical Security.