Critical infrastructures play a vital role in today’s societies, enabling many of the key functions and services upon which modern nations depend. From financial networks to emergency services, energy generation to water supply, these infrastructures fundamentally impact and continually improve our quality of life. Particularly vital in this regard are critical information infrastructures, those vast and crosscutting networks that link and effectively enable the proper functioning of other key infrastructures.

In this Whitepaper, Microsoft puts forward a top-down, function-based framework for assessing and managing risk to critical information infrastructures. This framework consists of five sequential steps, described in detail in this guide. Specifically:

• Determining risk management scope;
• Identifying critical information infrastructure functions;
• Analyzing critical function value chain and interdependencies;
• Assessing critical function risk; and
• Prioritizing and treating critical function risk.

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