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The Executive order 13636 was implemented by the President of the United Sates on February 13, 2013 to improve critical Infrastructures’ cybersecurity. According to Homeland Security, there are 16 critical infrastructure sectors in the United States whose assets and systems are so important and the destruction of those assets have a negative impact on national economic security, safety, security, public health and any combination thereof (“Critical Infrastructure Sectors”, n.d.).

Three ways to Decide and Implement Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) in the Energy Sector

Integrate Enterprise and Cybersecurity Risk Management: The Energy Sector is one of the critical infrastructures since it is the backbone of the US economy. By integrating with other organizations, the sector can manage its risk. Organization may also mange many types of risk by developing specific policies to identify, and assess risks among them. This is one of the reasons to implement CSF and helps to establish synergy. The other benefits are facilitating communications and having a common language for risk management (Barrett et al., 2017).

Evaluate Organizational Cybersecurity: Evaluating organizational cybersecurity helps the critical infrastructure sectors to evaluate their cybersecurity risk critically. It also informs the appropriateness of investing CSF in the particular organization systems (Barrett et al., 2017).

Manage the cybersecurity program: The CSF provides a way to assign cybersecurity responsibility to units in the organization. In addition, it provides a way to empower individuals charged with cybersecurity responsibilities. It also saves resources by identifying common controls which fits the specific sector (energy) (Barrett et al., 2017).

The above three ways help the Energy sector leaderships to decide and implement CSF to create synergy among other organizations to mitigate cybersecurity risk.

Barrett, M., Marron, J., Pillitteri, V. Y. Boyens, J., Witte, G., & Feldman, L. (2017). Draft NISTIR 8170, The Cybersecurity Framework: Implementation Guidance for Federal Agencies. Retrieved from https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Publications/nistir/8170/draft/documents/nistir8170-draft.pdf

Critical Infrastructure Sectors. (n.d). Retrieved from https://www.dhs.gov/critical-infrastructure-sectors