A formal program for identifying, assessing, and managing risks to essential services and assets. Under SOCI, it turns resilience into an ongoing governance obligation that must be integrated with operations, incident response, and accountability across internal teams and external providers.
Expanded Definition
A Critical Infrastructure Risk Management Program is the operating model that keeps essential services resilient under sustained cyber, operational, and third-party pressure. In NHI and agentic AI contexts, it must account for service identities, automated workflows, machine-to-machine trust, and the privilege boundaries that support power, water, transport, finance, healthcare, and communications.
Definitions vary across jurisdictions, but the governance pattern is consistent: identify critical assets, assess credible failure modes, assign accountability, and continuously test recovery and escalation paths. This aligns closely with the resilience intent of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, while NHI-specific exposure is often documented in NHIMG research such as the Top 10 NHI Issues and the Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Regulatory and Audit Perspectives.
The most common misapplication is treating the program as a compliance artifact, which occurs when organisations document critical assets without linking them to live operational controls, incident response, and provider oversight.
Examples and Use Cases
Implementing this rigorously often introduces reporting and coordination overhead, requiring organisations to weigh resilience visibility against the cost of continuous testing, evidence collection, and cross-team accountability.
- A utility maps every privileged service account and API key used in control systems, then ties each one to an owner, recovery step, and review cadence.
- A hospital includes third-party identity dependencies in its risk register so vendor outages, token failures, and access drift are tested as part of continuity planning.
- A transport operator simulates a credential compromise in a dispatch workflow and verifies that emergency procedures can still execute with reduced automation.
- A financial institution aligns incident response playbooks with identity telemetry so anomalous machine activity is escalated before service degradation becomes customer-visible.
These use cases mirror the lifecycle controls described in the NHI Lifecycle Management Guide and the public guidance in CISA cyber threat advisories. For sector-specific baseline expectations, many teams also reference the EU NIS2 Directive when building evidence for governance and supply-chain accountability.
Why It Matters in NHI Security
NHI risk is not abstract in critical infrastructure. In NHIMG’s 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities, 72% of organisations said they have experienced or suspect a breach involving NHIs, and two-thirds reported a successful cyberattack tied to compromised non-human identities. That matters because service accounts, tokens, certificates, and automation agents often sit on the control path for essential operations.
When this program is weak, organisations tend to over-focus on perimeter defenses while missing privilege sprawl, undocumented dependencies, and unmanaged recovery paths. The result is prolonged downtime, unsafe failover, and poor decision-making during incidents. The Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Key Challenges and Risks shows how quickly these gaps turn into governance failures, especially where automation touches production systems. The most common business impact appears only after a service outage, credential compromise, or supplier failure, at which point the risk program becomes the mechanism for restoring control.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 and NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| NIST CSF 2.0 | GV.RM | Defines risk management governance that maps directly to critical infrastructure resilience. |
| NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) | Zero Trust principles support continuous verification for critical infrastructure trust paths. | |
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-02 | Improper secret management is a core NHI risk inside critical operational environments. |
Maintain a living risk register and tie critical services to governance, monitoring, and response ownership.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
Deepen Your Knowledge
Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on July 9, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
