Mutual Aid for Resilient Infrastructure in Europe

ENISA recently published the Mutual Aid for Resilient Infrastructure in Europe (MARIE) Phase 1 Report. The objective of this first report is to promote the resilience of European ICT infrastructures through the use of MAA strategies.

This report presents twelve Key Observations about MAAs and in so doing lays the foundation for the recommendations, presented in the MARIE Phase 2 Report.  As one of the most prominent obstacles to further utilization of MAAs is organizations embracing emergency preparedness responsibilities that extend all the way outthrough to low probability and high impact events, many of the observations ofered here are tightly coupled with emergency preparedness motivation. Phases  and 4 are designed to serve as implementation and monitoring periods, which wll be essential to the full benefit realization of this mutual aid initiative.

Mutual Aid Agreements (MAAs) are an advanced means of emergency preparedness that have the following special characteristics:

• MAAs address the often overlooked tail of the distribution curve of crisis events, i.e. low probability but high impact events

• despite the above, MAAs are innovative in creating an attractive Return on Investment (ROI) by leveraging external resources with minimal payout until such resources are used in a crisis

• there is no alternative to MAAs that will enable the achievement of similar levels of resilience, other than those that require significant additional cost

• MAAs require overcoming regulatory, legal and competitive barriers – both real and perceived

• MAAs have proven effective in large scale catastrophes