NIS2 Directive

Discover how Brainframe can help you to achieve and manage your NIS2 compliance effectively

NIS2 compliance made easy

The NIS2 Directive sets a new standard for essential and important entities, ensuring robust security and operational resilience against digital threats. Brainframe is designed to simplify your journey to NIS2 compliance by providing a comprehensive Information Security Management System (ISMS) that aligns with NIS2’s requirements. Stay ahead of regulations with streamlined risk management, real-time monitoring, and document management, all in one platform. Ensure your organization’s resilience and compliance effortlessly.

Request demo

NIS2 scope

Essential entities

Essential entities are at the core of the NIS2 Directive's focus. They represent the backbone of society's critical infrastructure, meaning their disruption could have severe consequences for public safety, the economy, and even national security. These entities are expected to have heightened responsibilities under the directive due to the gravity of their functions, requiring stronger cybersecurity measures, comprehensive risk assessments, and faster incident reporting. Their operations are indispensable, making their protection from cyber threats paramount to maintaining stability and resilience across key societal systems.

Important entities

The NIS2 Directive classifies important entities as organizations that, while not critical to the foundational operation of societal and economic infrastructure, still play a significant role in ensuring the continuity of various services. These entities are typically involved in sectors that rely heavily on digital and networked systems for their operations. Their classification as "important" reflects the potential disruption that cyber incidents could cause if these services are compromised, even if they do not pose an immediate threat to public safety or essential societal functions.

Size matters

Large entities

>= 250 employees OR > 50 million in revenue

Medium entities

50 - 249 employees OR > 10 million in revenue

Small & micro entities

< 50 employees AND < 10 million in revenue

In the NIS2 Directive, an entity's size and revenue play a significant role in determining its classification as either essential or important.

Large entities, typically with over 250 employees or an annual turnover exceeding €50 million, are more likely to be classified as essential, especially if they operate in critical sectors.
Medium entities, with 50 to 250 employees or an annual turnover between €10 million and €50 million, are generally classified as important.
Small and micro entities, typically those with fewer than 50 employees and annual revenues under €10 million, are excluded from the scope of the NIS2 Directive unless they operate in particularly critical sectors or are otherwise deemed vital by national authorities due to the nature of their services

This distinction influences the level of supervision, with larger essential entities facing stricter oversight and potentially higher fines.

Non-compliance risks

The NIS2 Directive establishes strict penalties for non-compliance, which vary by country but include both administrative fines and other corrective measures.

Potential fines for non-compliance under NIS2 include:

For essential entities:
- Up to €10 million or 2% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher.
For important entities:
- Up to €7 million or 1.4% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher.

Other sanctions:

Suspension of certificates or licenses, which could halt business operations.
Publication of breaches, potentially damaging reputation.
Temporary or permanent bans from carrying out certain business activities.

The specific enforcement mechanisms will depend on the national legislation of each EU member state, which must transpose the directive by October 2024.

NIS2 Best Practices

Risk assessments

Risk assessments are crucial for NIS2 compliance, helping organizations identify vulnerabilities and prioritize cybersecurity measures. Regular assessments ensure alignment with NIS2 standards, allowing businesses to address emerging threats and improve their security posture. Risk assessments should be conducted regularly, as the cyber threat landscape is constantly evolving, and should include third-party service providers.

Incident management

NIS2 requires organizations to develop and maintain an effective plan to detect, respond to, and recover from cybersecurity incidents. This helps minimize damage, ensures business continuity, and meets NIS2's incident reporting requirements. A proactive incident response strategy also enhances an organization's overall resilience to cyber threats. Your incident management plan should also have strategies in place for reporting them to the competent authorities.

Access control and authentication

Access control and monitoring are key to NIS2 compliance, requiring strong authentication methods and continuous surveillance of systems to prevent unauthorized access. Implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA) and the principle of least privilege helps reduce insider threats, while real-time monitoring detects suspicious activity early. This ensures both data protection and compliance with NIS2’s security and reporting standards.

Supply chain security

A prerequisite for NIS2 compliance is the management of your supply chain security, as organizations are responsible for ensuring the cybersecurity of their third-party partners. This involves regularly auditing and monitoring suppliers to identify vulnerabilities, implementing strict security protocols, and enforcing compliance across the entire supply chain. Strengthening these relationships reduces risks and enhances overall cyber resilience.

Cybersecurity training

Cybersecurity training is essential for NIS2 compliance, ensuring that employees can recognize and respond to potential threats. Regular training sessions build awareness of security protocols and phishing attacks, while fostering a culture of cybersecurity. This helps minimize human error, which is a key factor in cyber incidents, and ensures compliance with NIS2’s risk management and reporting requirements

Cryptography & encryption

NIS2 sets strict requirements for cryptographic measures to ensure cybersecurity. Entities must implement robust encryption protocols for data in transit and at rest, particularly when dealing with sensitive or critical information. Key management practices should include secure generation, distribution, and storage of cryptographic keys. Public key infrastructures (PKIs) must be implemented where applicable, ensuring integrity and non-repudiation.

Business continuity

NIS2 requires entities to establish and maintain robust business continuity plans to ensure the resilience of essential services during disruptions. These plans must include risk management strategies, disaster recovery protocols, and mechanisms to ensure rapid recovery and continuity of critical operations. Regular testing and updates of the plans are mandated to ensure they remain effective against evolving risks. Entities must also ensure the continuity of supply chains and third-party services to minimize operational impact during incidents.

Network & information security

NIS2 mandates that security be integrated into the acquisition, development, and maintenance of network and information systems. This includes implementing secure development practices, regularly testing for vulnerabilities, and ensuring systems are designed with resilience against attacks. Vulnerability handling requires timely identification, mitigation, and patching of flaws, while vulnerability disclosure policies ensure transparency and responsible reporting to relevant authorities.

Brainframe overview

Asset Management

Brainframe enables you to maintain a comprehensive inventory of your assets, seamlessly mapping them to the processes they support. It allows you to assign a criticality level to each asset, ensuring you can effectively prioritize and manage your organization's key resources.

Risk Management

Brainframe allows you to define your risks for each asset, supplier or process, determining their criticality level, plan for and prioritize their mitigation, and offers a comprehensive view to track all your risks in a centralized dashboard.

Policy Management

Leverage Brainframe's comprehensive templates to efficiently develop the policies and procedures mandated by NIS2. Assign specific roles and responsibilities to management, ensuring their active involvement and accountability in the policy creation and decision-making process.

Maturity Management

Map your controls to their requirements and track your compliance frameworks' maturity level. Thanks to the deep integration with the task manager, you can show your progress and improve your audit efficiency.

Achieve NIS2 compliance with Brainframe

Self-hosted solution

Brainframe can be seamlessly implemented on your on-premises infrastructure, providing full control over your data and systems. This deployment option ensures compliance with internal security policies and regulatory requirements, while offering the same powerful features and capabilities of Brainframe’s cloud-based solutions. With on-premises implementation, you can tailor the platform to your unique environment, ensuring optimal performance and integration with existing infrastructure.

Cloud solution

Brainframe is available as a cloud-based solution, offering flexibility and scalability without the need for complex infrastructure management. This deployment option ensures quick implementation and automatic updates, while maintaining the highest levels of security and compliance. With Brainframe in the cloud, you can access the platform from anywhere, enabling seamless collaboration and ensuring that your organization stays resilient and up-to-date with minimal overhead.

Discover our solution for each of these NIS2 requirements for a better overview on how Brainframe can help you :

Risk Management

Flexible Risk Management and Regulatory Alignment

Brainframe provides tools for flexible risk assessments, incorporating qualitative risk matrices and customized risk views tailored to different departments or products. This allows organizations to continuously identify, assess, and manage risks in line with NIS2 requirements, which mandate ongoing analysis of threats and vulnerabilities. The platform also supports the integration of multiple regulatory frameworks and standards, such as ISO 27001 and NIST, enabling organizations to align their risk management practices with various compliance obligations.

Comprehensive Monitoring, Documentation, and Workflow Management:

The platform offers continuous monitoring features to track operational risks in real-time, helping organizations implement ongoing improvements and maintain compliance with NIS2’s emphasis on proactive monitoring and incident response. Brainframe supports customized workflows and task management, using tools like Kanban boards and checklists to prioritize and oversee risk management activities. It also facilitates thorough documentation of all risk management processes, policies, and procedures, including version control and audit trails, ensuring readiness for internal and external audits.

Asset Management and Visualization

Brainframe includes robust asset management capabilities, allowing organizations to identify and manage digital and physical assets, understand dependencies, and document recovery objectives. The platform enables visualization of asset dependencies through an automated diagram system, providing a clear and structured view of how assets are interconnected and ensuring alignment with NIS2’s requirements for understanding asset relationships. Integration options also allow for seamless import of existing asset inventories from other systems, simplifying the asset management process and supporting better decision-making.

Supply Chain Security

Structured Risk Management for Third-Party Suppliers

Brainframe helps organizations identify, assess, and manage risks associated with third-party suppliers by providing structured processes for evaluating their security posture. The platform supports continuous risk monitoring and mitigation throughout the supply chain, as required by NIS2, by integrating cybersecurity risk measures into supplier contracts and conducting regular audits to ensure compliance with necessary security standards.

Seamless Integration and Continuous Monitoring

The platform enables organizations to inventory and manage third-party assets with the same level of oversight as internal assets, streamlining risk assessment and providing detailed insights into vendor security postures. Brainframe’s built-in questionnaire templates facilitate regular supplier security assessments, ensuring that third-party vulnerabilities do not jeopardize the security of the entire supply chain, in line with NIS2 compliance requirements.

Enhanced Visibility and Communication

Brainframe’s visualization feature provides a comprehensive, real-time graphical interface that shows how third-party providers interact with internal assets and processes, helping identify dependencies, data flows, and potential vulnerabilities within the extended supply chain. The "Forms" module allows for a seamless onboarding process by collecting necessary information through customizable templates, enabling organizations to update their risk landscape efficiently based on vendor assessments.

Incident Management

Streamlined Incident Reporting and Documentation

Brainframe helps organizations comply with NIS2's strict incident reporting timelines by maintaining clear reporting channels, automating documentation from initial reports to final analysis, and providing customizable templates to simplify reporting processes. This ensures that incidents are logged, categorized, and monitored consistently and communicated promptly to relevant stakeholders, supporting efficient incident management and response.

Integration with Best Practices and Standards

The platform integrates best practices from standards like ISO 27001, aligning with NIS2 requirements for incident detection, reporting, and management. It encourages regular reviews and improvements of the security management system, ensuring that security objectives are consistently aligned with business goals and that top management is accountable for cybersecurity measures, as mandated by NIS2.

Facilitates Communication and Coordination

Brainframe enhances communication with external entities such as regulatory bodies and third-party vendors by establishing efficient communication channels. This capability supports faster reporting and coordinated responses, aiding compliance with NIS2's emphasis on collaboration and transnational reporting, ensuring that all incidents are reported and managed effectively.

Business Continuity

Robust Backup and Recovery Management

Brainframe supports the creation and management of robust backup processes, allowing organizations to define data backup needs, determine backup frequencies, and choose storage locations (on-site, or cloud). Regular testing ensures backups are reliable and effective, minimizing downtime and data loss during disruptions, in alignment with NIS2 business continuity requirements.

Comprehensive Incident Response and Business Continuity Planning

The platform enables organizations to develop clear incident response plans with predefined roles, responsibilities, and procedures, supporting real-time communication and collaboration among teams. It also helps prioritize critical systems and data for recovery efforts, ensuring a coordinated and efficient response to incidents and alignment with NIS2's focus on maintaining operational resilience.

Centralized Documentation and Collaboration

Brainframe provides comprehensive document management features, maintaining audit trails, version controls, and approval processes for all business continuity plans, policies, and procedures. It also enhances collaboration among stakeholders through task management, workflow creation, and real-time notifications, supporting NIS2's emphasis on effective communication and coordination to ensure continuous business operations.

Cybersecurity Trainings

Comprehensive Management of Cybersecurity Training Programs

Brainframe provides a platform to manage and track cybersecurity training for all employees, including the creation, distribution, and monitoring of training materials. This ensures that every employee receives the necessary education on cybersecurity awareness and practices, fulfilling NIS2's requirements for comprehensive cybersecurity training.

Automation and Continuous Monitoring

The platform automates the scheduling of regular cybersecurity training sessions and sends reminders to employees, supporting continuous learning and compliance with NIS2’s requirement for ongoing education. It includes tools for tracking training progress and completion rates, identifying knowledge gaps, and maintaining high levels of awareness against emerging threats.

Documentation and Compliance Assurance

All training activities are documented within the system, creating an audit trail that records training completion, employee participation, and updates to training content. This documentation is essential for demonstrating compliance with NIS2's cybersecurity training mandates during audits or assessments, ensuring all requirements are fully met.

Audit trail

Brainframe ensures a comprehensive and automated audit trail by recording all actions, changes, and updates made within the system. It tracks user activities, policy modifications, risk assessments, and compliance measures, providing clear, time-stamped documentation. This detailed audit trail not only simplifies internal and external audits but also ensures transparency, accountability, and alignment with regulatory requirements like NIS2.

KPIs

Brainframe enables comprehensive KPI monitoring, providing a centralized dashboard for tracking key performance metrics across departments or product lines. It offers real-time insights to ensure clear visibility into progress and performance. This streamlined approach facilitates data-driven decision-making and helps maintain alignment with organizational goals and compliance requirements.

Integrations

Brainframe supports seamless integrations with your existing systems (SharePoint, JIRA, Monday.com,...) allowing you to easily import documents and records. This ensures a smooth transition by centralizing all relevant files within the platform, reducing manual work, and maintaining consistency. By integrating your current document workflows, the software helps streamline processes and enhance efficiency across your organization.

Interested in knowing more?

Book a call to find out more on how we can help you achieve and manage your compliance with NIS2.

Request demo

Start for free now!

Streamline your GRC work using our all-in-one management solution and get access to our network of local specialists

Start your free account