Amidst all the pandemic doom and gloom, we finally have something positive come from the chaos: NERC filed a motion recently (April 6, 2020) to defer three Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) Reliability Standards (as well as 1 PER, and 3 PRC standards) for three months due to the national emergency declared on March 13th by President Trump. As the original implementation date was July 1, 2020, this means that should FERC approve the motion, the new implementation date would be October 1, 2020. You can find the announcement here and the filing here, but rather than read through that material, I have some proposals on how to better spend your time!
“So, what should I be working on now,” you ask? Well, if your implementation of any of the deferred requirements has been lagging, this is a great opportunity to spruce them up in-between other spring cleaning tasks. The three CIP requirements included in the deferral include the following (the text in italics is my summarization and key takeaways of the new components within this revision of the requirements):
CIP-005-5 and CIP-010-2 were modified as part of an initiative called “Project 2016-03 Cyber Security Supply…
