What can other jurisdictions learn from the CISA model? Building national-scale cybersecurity capability

Cybersecurity is now a national capability

Cybersecurity is no longer simply an IT problem managed by individual government agencies or private companies. As economies become more dependent on digital infrastructure, a successful cyberattack can disrupt electricity, water, transportation, healthcare, financial services, communications, government operations, and industrial production. The strategic challenge for governments is therefore not just how to protect individual systems, but how to create a national capability that can identify systemic risks, coordinate action, share intelligence, strengthen weaker organizations, and respond rapidly when attacks occur.

The United States offers an important model through the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Established within the Department of Homeland Security, CISA operates as a national coordination and capability-building organization across government and critical infrastructure. Its role is built around collective defense: bringing together public agencies, private infrastructure owners, technology providers, academia, and other stakeholders to understand and manage risks that individual organizations cannot address effectively on their own. The agency describes itself as being at the center of mobilizing collective defense around critical infrastructure and associated National Critical Functions.

For other jurisdictions, the important lesson is not that they should reproduce CISA institutionally. The more valuable lesson is that cybersecurity can be treated as a national service capability rather than a collection of disconnected agency responsibilities. A well-designed national cybersecurity organization can provide common infrastructure, intelligence, standards, technical services, skills, incident coordination, and risk management capabilities that would be too expensive or difficult for many organizations to build independently.

The central question is therefore whether the CISA model provides an efficient way to scale cybersecurity protection nationally. The answer is potentially yes, but only if governments understand what makes the model valuable. Its strength is not simply its size or authority. It lies in combining centralized expertise with decentralized implementation, while creating mechanisms through which information, tools, expertise, and risk intelligence can move rapidly across organizational boundaries.

The CISA model: from agency protection to collective defense

Traditional government cybersecurity models tend to be fragmented. Each ministry, department, local authority, utility, hospital, financial institution, or infrastructure operator is responsible for its own security. A central cybersecurity authority may issue policies or provide advice, but much of the operational burden remains with individual organizations.

This approach creates an obvious weakness. Cyber threats do not respect organizational boundaries. The same vulnerability can affect hundreds of organizations simultaneously, while an attack against one telecommunications provider, cloud platform, software supplier, or energy company can create consequences far beyond the organization that was initially compromised.

CISA represents a different approach. Its mandate combines cybersecurity, infrastructure security, emergency communications, risk management, information sharing, technical assistance, training, exercises, and incident response. The agency provides capacity building, technical assistance, tools, exercises, training, and awareness programs, while also serving as a federal lead for cyber incident response across government and the private sector.

This creates what can be described as a national cybersecurity operating model. Rather than expecting every organization to develop the same capabilities independently, the state provides a shared layer of expertise and services that raises the baseline across the economy.

That distinction is particularly important for smaller organizations. A large bank or telecommunications company may have extensive security operations, specialist staff, threat intelligence teams, and sophisticated monitoring systems. A small municipality, hospital, water utility, manufacturer, or local government agency may have none of these capabilities. A national model can reduce this disparity by making high-value cybersecurity capabilities available as a public or shared service.

Why national scale matters

The economics of cybersecurity strongly favor greater coordination. The cost of building specialized cybersecurity capability is high, particularly when organizations need to maintain 24-hour monitoring, threat intelligence, incident response, vulnerability management, digital forensics, specialist skills, and secure infrastructure.

Duplicating these capabilities across thousands of organizations is rarely efficient. It also produces uneven levels of protection, inconsistent standards, fragmented information, and slow responses to emerging threats.

A national cybersecurity capability can create economies of scale in several ways. Government can invest once in common platforms and make them available across multiple agencies and infrastructure operators. It can establish common security standards and reusable tools rather than requiring each organization to develop its own approach. It can aggregate threat intelligence from multiple sources and distribute relevant information rapidly to organizations that may otherwise lack visibility of emerging threats.

CISA's model demonstrates this principle through its role as a national hub for cybersecurity and communications information, including near-real-time information sharing. It also collects and analyzes risk data to inform the prioritization of risk management activities.

The value is therefore not only financial. National scale can improve the speed and quality of decision-making. If one organization discovers a new attack technique, the national capability can help ensure that other organizations are warned before they become victims.

This creates a network effect in cybersecurity: the more effectively organizations participate, the more useful the national system becomes.

Build a national cybersecurity service, not just a regulator

One of the strongest lessons from the CISA model is that a national cybersecurity agency should not become primarily a compliance regulator.

Regulation has an important role. Governments need minimum security standards, reporting requirements, accountability mechanisms, and rules for critical infrastructure. But compliance alone does not make an organization secure. A smaller organization can be fully compliant with a standard while still lacking the operational capability to detect and respond to a sophisticated attack.

A national cybersecurity agency should therefore combine policy authority with practical service delivery. Its responsibilities could include threat intelligence, vulnerability information, incident response, security testing, technical assistance, training, exercises, secure communications, security architecture guidance, and shared cybersecurity platforms.

This is particularly important where government owns or funds critical services. Rather than simply telling a local authority or public hospital that it must improve cybersecurity, the national government can provide the capability to help it do so.

The distinction is similar to the difference between setting a national transportation standard and building national roads. Standards establish expectations, but shared infrastructure makes those expectations achievable.

Create a national critical infrastructure framework

Another transferable element of the CISA approach is the use of a structured critical infrastructure framework. The United States identifies 16 critical infrastructure sectors, covering areas such as energy, communications, financial services, healthcare, transportation, water, information technology, emergency services, manufacturing, and government facilities.

Other jurisdictions do not need to copy the exact American sector classification. They should instead identify the infrastructure and services whose disruption could cause significant economic, social, security, or public safety consequences.

The more useful question is not simply, "Which organizations are critical?" It is, "Which national functions must continue operating during a major crisis?"

This distinction matters because modern economies depend on complex interdependencies. A hospital may depend on electricity, telecommunications, cloud computing, water, pharmaceuticals, payment systems, logistics, and identity services. A disruption to one of those supporting systems can affect organizations that were not themselves directly attacked.

A national critical infrastructure framework should therefore map dependencies as well as assets. It should identify nationally important functions, the infrastructure supporting them, major concentration risks, key suppliers, and potential single points of failure.

The United States' 16 critical infrastructure sectors - CISA organizes US critical infrastructure into 16 sectors whose disruption could have significant consequences for national security, economic security, public health, or public safety. 

Sector	Sector	Sector	Sector
Chemical	Commercial Facilities	Communications	Critical Manufacturing
Dams	Defense Industrial Base	Emergency Services	Energy
Financial Services	Food and Agriculture	Government Services and Facilities	Healthcare and Public Health
Information Technology	Nuclear Reactors, Materials, and Waste	Transportation Systems	Water and Wastewater

Establish a national cyber operations center

A practical CISA-inspired model should include a national cyber operations capability that operates continuously rather than only during major incidents.

This could provide national-level threat monitoring, intelligence analysis, vulnerability coordination, incident escalation, and technical support. It would not necessarily replace security operations centers within individual organizations. Instead, it would operate as a coordinating layer above them.

The operating principle should be "detect once, protect many." If a threat is identified against a widely used technology, the national capability should be able to rapidly assess exposure, notify affected organizations, provide mitigation guidance, and coordinate response.

Such a model requires common data standards and secure information-sharing mechanisms. It also requires clear rules governing what information can be shared, with whom, and under what circumstances. Without trust, organizations may hesitate to report incidents because they fear regulatory penalties, reputational damage, or commercial consequences.

The governance challenge is therefore as important as the technology.

Make public-private collaboration operational

Critical infrastructure is often owned and operated by private companies. This makes public-private collaboration essential.

CISA's approach places significant emphasis on collaboration with private-sector partners, academia, and government organizations. Its model is based not only on government issuing instructions but on creating mechanisms through which stakeholders can make informed risk-management decisions and investments.

Other governments can apply the same principle through sector-based cyber partnerships. Energy companies, banks, telecommunications providers, transportation operators, healthcare organizations, technology companies, and government agencies should have structured mechanisms for sharing information and coordinating responses.

These partnerships should move beyond meetings and policy forums. They should support operational activities such as joint exercises, threat briefings, vulnerability coordination, incident simulations, shared intelligence, and coordinated crisis response.

The objective should be to create trusted networks before a crisis occurs. During a major cyber incident, there is little time to determine who has authority, who should contact whom, or which information can be shared.

Develop shared cybersecurity infrastructure

The most powerful version of the model would treat some cybersecurity capabilities as national digital infrastructure.

Governments could provide shared services such as secure threat intelligence platforms, vulnerability scanning, security monitoring, incident reporting, digital forensics, malware analysis, secure communications, identity services, and national cyber ranges for training and exercises.

Cloud-based delivery makes many of these capabilities increasingly practical. Smaller public agencies and infrastructure operators could consume national cybersecurity services without having to build complete security operations themselves.

However, shared infrastructure also creates concentration risk. If a national platform becomes a single point of failure, compromising that platform could affect many organizations simultaneously. Governments therefore need strong architecture, segmentation, redundancy, independent assurance, and contingency arrangements.

National cybersecurity infrastructure must itself be treated as critical infrastructure.

Build a distributed workforce

Cybersecurity capability cannot be created through technology alone. Skilled people remain one of the largest constraints.

A CISA-inspired model should combine a central cadre of highly specialized experts with a broader national workforce distributed across government and critical infrastructure organizations. The central organization can provide specialist skills that would be difficult to maintain everywhere, while local teams retain knowledge of their own systems and operational environments.

This creates a hub-and-spoke capability model. The national center provides intelligence, specialist expertise, tools, standards, and surge capacity. Sector and local organizations remain responsible for day-to-day security and implementation.

Training should extend beyond cybersecurity specialists. Senior executives, procurement teams, engineers, system administrators, infrastructure operators, and frontline employees all influence cyber resilience.

The goal should be to make cybersecurity an organizational capability rather than the responsibility of a small technical department.

Integrate cybersecurity with infrastructure resilience

A particularly important lesson from CISA is the integration of cyber and physical security. Modern infrastructure does not have separate "cyber" and "physical" worlds. A cyberattack can disable physical machinery, while physical disruption can compromise digital systems.

CISA's role includes helping infrastructure owners address cyber and physical threats through an integrated approach, recognizing that many critical infrastructure assets are operated by private organizations and that resilience depends on cooperation across government and industry.

Other jurisdictions should adopt the same perspective.

National resilience strategies should consider cyberattack alongside natural disasters, physical sabotage, supply-chain disruption, telecommunications outages, power failures, and other threats. This allows governments to prioritize investments based on consequences rather than treating cybersecurity as an isolated technology issue.

Governance: the most difficult part of the model

Creating a national cybersecurity agency is relatively straightforward compared with deciding how it should operate.

The central governance question is where responsibility begins and ends. A national agency should have enough authority to coordinate national responses, establish minimum expectations, access necessary information, and provide services. At the same time, it should not attempt to operate every organization's cybersecurity function.

A practical model requires three layers of accountability. The national cybersecurity organization owns national coordination, intelligence, shared capabilities, standards, and major incident support. Sector regulators and ministries remain responsible for sector-specific policy and oversight. Individual infrastructure owners remain accountable for protecting their own systems and managing their operational risks.

This prevents the national agency from becoming either powerless or excessively centralized.

It also requires transparent escalation processes. Organizations should know when an incident becomes a national incident, who can declare a national cyber emergency, what information must be shared, and which agency leads the response.

The risks of copying CISA too closely

The CISA model should not be treated as a blueprint that can simply be transplanted into another country.

The United States has a large federal system, a highly developed private sector, substantial national security institutions, and a vast critical infrastructure ecosystem. Smaller countries may require much leaner structures.

There is also a danger that creating a new national cybersecurity agency simply adds another layer of bureaucracy. If existing ministries, regulators, intelligence agencies, police organizations, emergency management bodies, and national CERTs already have overlapping mandates, a new institution can increase fragmentation rather than reduce it.

Governments should therefore begin with capabilities and outcomes rather than organizational charts. The question should be what national capabilities are missing, duplicated, or fragmented, and which institution is best positioned to provide them.

Another risk is excessive centralization. National cybersecurity systems inevitably become attractive targets. A model that concentrates intelligence, tools, credentials, and operational access in one organization can create systemic vulnerability if governance and technical controls are weak.

The objective should be coordinated decentralization, not centralized control.

An alternative view: perhaps CISA is not the answer

There is a legitimate argument that governments should not attempt to create a large national cybersecurity agency modeled on CISA.

In some jurisdictions, cybersecurity may be better delivered through a distributed ecosystem of sector regulators, national CERTs, intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and private-sector security providers. Governments could establish common standards and information-sharing mechanisms while allowing the market to provide most operational services.

This model may be cheaper and more flexible, particularly where private-sector cybersecurity capabilities are already mature. It could also reduce the risk of creating an oversized government bureaucracy.

The weakness is that market-based systems do not necessarily optimize for national resilience. Individual companies rationally prioritize their own risks and commercial interests. They may not invest enough in capabilities whose benefits primarily accrue to other organizations or to society as a whole.

The strongest approach may therefore be neither a fully centralized CISA model nor a purely market-driven system. It is a national coordination architecture in which government provides capabilities that are difficult to replicate commercially, while private organizations retain responsibility for their own systems and continue to use commercial providers where appropriate.

A practical roadmap for other jurisdictions

Governments considering a CISA-inspired approach should begin with a national cyber capability assessment. This should identify critical national functions, major infrastructure dependencies, existing cybersecurity institutions, workforce gaps, information-sharing barriers, incident response capabilities, and duplicated investments.

The next step should be to establish a clear national operating model. This should define who sets policy, who regulates, who provides shared services, who coordinates incidents, who owns threat intelligence, and who is accountable for critical infrastructure resilience.

Governments should then prioritize a small number of high-value shared capabilities. These could include national threat intelligence, vulnerability coordination, incident response, cybersecurity exercises, secure communications, and support for organizations with limited cyber resources.

The model should expand progressively rather than attempting to build everything at once. Early success should be measured by practical outcomes: faster detection, higher security baselines, shorter incident response times, broader participation in information sharing, improved workforce capability, and reduced exposure to common vulnerabilities.

Most importantly, the system should be designed around national functions rather than government departments. Cybersecurity is ultimately about keeping the country operating.

The real lesson is collective capability

The most important lesson from CISA is not that every country needs a large national cybersecurity agency. It is that cybersecurity at national scale requires capabilities that individual organizations cannot efficiently build alone.

A modern national cybersecurity model should combine central expertise with distributed responsibility. It should provide shared intelligence, common tools, technical assistance, incident response, workforce development, risk analysis, secure communications, and infrastructure resilience while leaving operational accountability with the organizations that own and operate critical systems.

The economic case is compelling. Shared capabilities can reduce duplication, raise cybersecurity standards, and provide smaller organizations with access to expertise they could not otherwise afford. The strategic case is even stronger: collective defense allows a country to identify systemic threats earlier and coordinate action before localized incidents become national crises.

The next generation of national cybersecurity agencies should therefore be designed less like traditional regulators and more like national capability platforms. Their success should be judged not by the number of policies they publish or compliance reports they receive, but by whether the country's essential services are becoming harder to disrupt, faster to recover, and better prepared for threats that have not yet emerged.

For governments, the opportunity is to move from fragmented cybersecurity spending toward a coherent national capability. CISA provides an important reference point, but the deeper lesson is broader: in an interconnected digital economy, resilience is a collective asset, and governments need institutions capable of building it at scale.

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