Skip to main content

Critical processes and services

Strengthen critical business processes and services to reduce the risk of disruption.

Critical processes and services are the core processes and services needed to deliver an organisation’s primary outcomes. Compromise or loss can directly prevent the organisation from delivering critical outcomes or services.

Malicious actors targeting this domain typically pursue disruption (rendering services unavailable through ransomware or destructive attacks) or theft (exfiltration of high-value data for intelligence, competitive advantage or extortion). As these assets represent the highest-value targets, they attract the most capable and deliberate malicious actor activity.

The guidance within the ASD Essentials is organised into Domains, Principles and Actions. 

  • Domains describe logical groupings of assets within systems and their operating environments.
  • Principles describe the security outcomes organisations should achieve.
  • Actions describe prioritised activities for each of those security outcomes. 

These resources provide additional guidance to support the implementation of the Essentials for enterprise IT. They provide implementation guidance for achieving the indicators of good practice associated with each Action. 

ASD’s Information security manual (ISM) also provides a catalogue of security controls that can be used to achieve the implementation of each Principle and Action.

Was this helpful?
Yes this was helpful
No this was not helpful

Thanks for your feedback!

We welcome additional feedback below.

How easy was it to find information?
How easy was it to understand this information?
After reading this, how confident are you that you know what to do next?
Overall, how satisfied were you with your experience on this website today?
vertical_align_top Back to top