NERC CIP Standards

Abstract

The critical infrastructure protection (CIP) set of standards is developed by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) to ensure the protection of assets used to operate North America's bulk electric systems (BES). Any entity that owns or operates any type of BES in the United States and Canada must be compliant with the requirements of the NERC CIP standards. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an ample overview of the NERC CIP standards, to describe its relevance to the protection electric utility entities, to establish its harmonizing relation with the NIST cyber security framework, to provide a glimpse of its compliance requirements, and to investigate the gaps and prospects for workforce development training in this area of critical need. This chapter lays the foundation for opportunities in the design of automated NERC CIP standards compliance processes and toolkit, the feasibility study of adopting the CIP standards in other sectors, and the development of training materials in NERC CIP standards for workforce development.