Looking Ahead to Better Prepare Today

CISA Releases the Latest Update to the Secure Tomorrow Series Toolkit

Critical infrastructure owners and operators have a lot on their plate. Social, technological, economic, environmental, and political changes contribute to new and evolving risks at seemingly faster rates. Meanwhile, critical infrastructure owners and operators and their partners have operational, business, and other demands that compete with their time and ability to reflect on future resilience and security needs.

With multiple risk factors and demands on everyone’s time, asking the right questions is critical to gaining better insights. While everyone wants to be ready for whatever’s coming on the horizon, having discussions around an uncertain future can feel daunting, and an unfocused approach can result in vague and nonactionable strategies that can leave organizations and their people less safe and less resilient.

The Secure Tomorrow Series Toolkit is meant to help fill this gap by structuring and facilitating these discussions. Each year, CISA selects three topics with significant potential to disrupt multiple National Critical Functions and delves into how these topics might result in emerging and evolving risks that affect critical infrastructure resilience and security. CISA uses this knowledge base to build a toolkit of strategic foresight activities. The idea is to package proven methods, high quality prompts, and extensive supporting materials together, so that critical infrastructure partners can confidently bring together participants with domain-, regional-, and sector-specific expertise and productively arrive at risk mitigation strategies that are relevant and actionable. Secure Tomorrow Series Toolkit products help distill and distinguish real concerns arising from each topic, which participants then ground in the realities of their situations. 

Today’s update introduces three new topics: 

• Information and communications technology supply chain resilience
• Advanced manufacturing
• Water availability

These topics add to the existing toolkit library that covers brain-computer interfaces, synthetic biology, quantum technologies, anonymity and privacy, trust and social cohesion, and data storage and transmission.

Each toolkit activity is carefully designed to allow whoever is sponsoring an activity to engage with their critical infrastructure community in fun, challenging, and productive ways. From matrix games that can be played in a single morning or afternoon session, to one-day scenarios workshops that integrate multiple topics to highlight systems and emergent risks, the toolkit has activities targeted to different levels of participation and time commitment. The hope is that these activities lead to better insights on risk mitigation that participants can bring back to their organizations, while strengthening networks to engage in further planning and implementation.

Download/share the Secure Tomorrow Series Toolkit.

To learn more, visit the Secure Tomorrow Series webpage.