Today, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released the updated National Emergency Communications Plan (NECP) – the Nation’s roadmap to ensuring emergency communications interoperability at all levels of government. The NECP was updated to address the current gaps within emergency communications, reflect new and emerging technological advancements, and provide guidance to drive the nation towards a common end-state for communications.

CISA engaged more than 3,500 public safety representatives from federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial public safety agencies, non-governmental organizations, and other groups in revising the NECP to ensure it reflects the whole community’s expertise, experience, and needs.

The updated NECP:

• Builds upon the key concepts and principles of the 2008 and 2014 versions of the NECP;
• Revises the vision statement to address secure information exchange and adds the public to acknowledge their increasing role in emergency communications;
• Emphasizes the importance of strategic and lifecycle planning and sustainable funding;
• Promotes the importance of evaluating and documenting lessons learned from training and exercises;
• Underscores the need for coordination of communications assets and capabilities at incidents and planned events;
• Emphasizes technology and infrastructure lifecycle management and focuses on effective and interoperable information sharing; and
• Adds a new goal focused on cybersecurity risk management, the mitigation of cybersecurity vulnerabilities, cyber hygiene minimums and funding.

CISA will host a series of 60-minute webinars to discuss the updates to the NECP and answer questions. The webinars are open to the public. The dates are as follows:

Wednesday, October 2, 2019, 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm ET
Tuesday, October 8, 2019, 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm ET
Wednesday, October 9, 2019, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm ET
To participate use: webinar link (for visual): https://share.dhs.gov/necp2019 and dial-in (for audio): (800) 381-7839.

To review the updated NECP visit: https://www.cisa.gov/necp or for questions about the NECP, contact: necp@cisa.dhs.gov.