Regulation guide
Critical infrastructure protection
Critical infrastructure protection is the practice of securing the systems society depends on — energy, water, transport, health and digital services. Under NIS2 it comes with hard duties around incident reporting and data breach notification.
The basics
Securing critical infrastructure
Incident reporting is the core duty
Incident reporting sits at the heart of NIS2. When a significant incident hits your critical infrastructure, the clock starts — and data breach notification obligations may run in parallel under GDPR.What counts as critical infrastructure
Critical infrastructure spans the essential sectors whose disruption would seriously affect the economy, public safety or health.
The regulatory driver
NIS2 makes critical infrastructure protection a legal obligation for essential and important entities, backed by supervision and penalties.
Detect, report, recover
Protection is not just prevention: you must detect incidents, meet incident reporting deadlines and notify affected parties.
What protecting critical infrastructure requires
Continuous monitoring
You cannot report what you cannot see. Detection underpins incident reporting.
Incident reporting workflow
A 24-hour early warning and 72-hour notification process for significant incidents.
Data breach notification
Where personal data is affected, GDPR breach notification runs alongside NIS2.
Response capability
An incident response function that turns alerts into contained, documented events.
Where to next
Build the detection and response layer
SIEM
A SIEM gives you the monitoring and detection incident reporting depends on.
Incident response
An IR platform keeps you inside the NIS2 reporting deadlines.
Critical infrastructure protection FAQs
What is critical infrastructure protection?
The set of policies, controls and processes that keep essential systems and services secure and resilient.
How does incident reporting work under NIS2?
In-scope entities must submit an early warning within 24 hours and a full notification within 72 hours of a significant incident.
When is data breach notification required?
Under GDPR, personal-data breaches must be reported to the supervisory authority within 72 hours where feasible.
Give incident reporting the detection it needs.
Compare open-source SIEM and incident response tooling built for critical infrastructure.