A key issue for the management and control of such large complex critical infrastructures with their manifold dependencies is information management. For information management within one critical infrastructure the currently existing approaches have to be extended and adapted to the new needs in future networks. The usage of external ICT networks and the growing complexity of information to be managed are the main points. Much more information from different sources has to be processed in much shorter time intervals. Equally important,information from depending critical infrastructures has to be provided and processed in a form enabling holistic risk estimation and management.
Management and control of large complex critical infrastructures are done today by highly skilled and trained experts with significant and indispensable support from sophisticated highly adapted ICT systems. These systems provide three main functionalities:
- collection and processing of all incoming information from the own network and from related networks
- analysis of information according to highly adapted, special purpose built-in procedures
- presentation of information and results in an appropriate form to the human experts.