Enhancing Organisation Resilience in Nuclear Industries

Assuring the resilience of complex, increasingly ICT-enabled, cyber-physical ecosystems entails a multifaceted challenge revolving around the aspect of people using devices networked within and across large-scale, socio-technical infrastructures managed by organisations.

Consequently, organisations are themselves considered as complex critical infrastructures consisting of human-in-the-loop software and hardware components that may be attacked and fail in substantially different ways. Hence, organisational resilience is vital and, at the same time, an overarching property reaching beyond ad hoc and technology-specific (cyber)attack protection solutions since it spans over non-technical practices. Organisational resilience has traditionally been complementary to cybersecurity and has so far been studied in the context of qualitative risk management and assessment within organisations having minimal interface with technical resilience-by-design principles. As extensively discussed by important standardisation and regulatory bodies (e.g., NIST, ENISA), standardised frameworks for resilience practice within organisations are lacking due to general lack of understanding of resilience metrics. It is highlighted that the timely recovery of organisations from cyberattacks requires technical resilience frameworks that integrate measurable methods for quantifying non-technical, human, and organisational risk factors. Therefore, a missing gap in foundational principles for enabling effective resilience-by-design is evident and it is necessary to introduce a generic approach where key non-technical properties are adequately mapped during the design and implementation of next generation resilience mechanisms.
In this project, we will refine existing practices and introduce new fundamental principles for the organisational resilience of the nuclear industry, focusing on post-cyberattack recovery. This will form the basis for organisations of the nuclear industry to confront existing and future cyberattacks, and establish guidelines for the development of next generation resilience mechanisms. Through a cross-disciplinary approach, we will develop a generic framework in which qualitative risk analysis associated with organisational incident response practices will be mapped onto measurable technical requirements and policies for the development of adaptive post-threat recovery in large-scale socio-technical infrastructures.

The development of the envisaged organisational resilience framework requires the consideration of several key questions. These include the design of optimal principles for aggregating, processing and understanding diverse sources of input from an organisational and technical perspective as well as how contextual information can be harnessed. This is required in order to qualitatively assess how human practices and structural properties of governance within and across organisations affect the deployment of timely post-threat recovery. Also, it is essential to identify the appropriate set of technologies in order to facilitate a correct basis for supporting non-technical requirements and further enabling the design of adaptive recovery mechanisms