Operational situational awareness

The operational situational awareness requirement means you must maintain continuous, decision-ready visibility into cyber conditions that could disrupt critical operations, and you must be able to prove that visibility works in practice. Operationalize it by defining “critical operations,” instrumenting monitoring and alerting around them, and running a standing cadence of operational risk briefings tied to real telemetry and ticket outcomes ¹.

Key takeaways:

• Scope the requirement around “critical operations,” not your whole enterprise, then expand coverage deliberately ¹.
• Evidence matters as much as tooling: retain alert-to-ticket traceability, briefing outputs, and escalation records ¹.
• A reliable operating rhythm (monitoring + alerting + operational risk briefings) is the fastest path to audit-ready maturity ¹.

“Operational situational awareness” is easy to describe and surprisingly hard to defend in an exam, tabletop, or post-incident review. Most teams can show dashboards. Fewer can show that their monitoring focuses on what actually keeps the lights on, detects meaningful conditions, routes them to owners, and results in timely operational decisions.

In the DOE Cybersecurity Capability Maturity Model (C2M2), this requirement is expressed plainly: maintain visibility into cyber conditions affecting critical operations ¹. The practical compliance question behind that sentence is: can your organization confidently answer, at any moment, “What cyber conditions are currently elevating operational risk to our critical services, and what are we doing about them?”

This page gives requirement-level implementation guidance for a Compliance Officer, CCO, or GRC lead. It is designed for quick operationalization: scope, roles, telemetry, briefings, escalation, and the evidence package you will need. If you need a lightweight way to manage control owners, evidence requests, and recurring briefings, tools like Daydream can help you keep the program auditable without turning it into a documentation project.

Regulatory text

C2M2 operational situational awareness requirement (excerpt): “Maintain visibility into cyber conditions affecting critical operations.” ¹

What the operator must do

You must run a repeatable process that:

1. Identifies which operations are “critical” (the ones where loss of availability, integrity, or safety has unacceptable impact).
2. Maintains visibility into cyber conditions that could degrade those operations (threat activity, control failures, misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, outages, anomalous behavior, and third-party service issues).
3. Converts that visibility into action through monitoring, alerting, and operational risk briefings that inform decisions and produce trackable outcomes ¹.

This is not satisfied by owning a SIEM, having a SOC contract, or producing a monthly security metrics deck. Examiners will look for relevance to critical operations and evidence that signals lead to decisions.

Plain-English interpretation (what “good” looks like)

Operational situational awareness means your operators and executives can quickly answer:

• What’s happening right now that could impair critical operations?
• How do we know (what signals and sources)?
• Who owns the response path (on-call, escalation, incident lead)?
• What decision is required (accept risk, mitigate, fail over, isolate, patch, stop work)?
• Where is the evidence trail (alerts, tickets, briefings, decisions)?

A practical standard: if your primary monitoring lead is out, another qualified person should still be able to run the briefing, explain active risks to critical operations, and show the underlying alerts and remediation tickets.

Who it applies to (entity and operational context)

Entity types (baseline):

• Critical infrastructure operators
• Energy sector organizations ¹

Operational context (typical in scope systems):

• OT/ICS environments and supporting IT (where applicable to operations)
• SCADA, DCS, PLC networks and their remote access paths
• Identity and access systems controlling privileged access to operational environments
• Network segmentation and boundary protections around operations
• Critical third-party dependencies that can degrade operations (telecom, managed security services, cloud hosting where it supports operations, OEM support channels)

If you are not in energy, the same requirement logic still maps cleanly: define “critical operations” as the business services whose disruption becomes a safety, systemic, contractual, or mission failure.

What you actually need to do (step-by-step)

Step 1: Define “critical operations” and the decision owners

Create a short, governed list:

• Critical operations (services/processes)
• Supporting systems and data flows
• Operational owners (business/plant/operations)
• Cyber owners (SOC, OT security, IT ops)
• Decision owners (who can accept risk, shut down access, trigger failover)

Deliverable: Critical Operations Register (one page per operation is enough).

Step 2: Define “cyber conditions” you must see

Translate the requirement into monitored condition categories tied to operational impact. A workable set:

• Availability degradation indicators (service outages, network loss, failed remote access, failed backups relevant to operations)
• Integrity risk indicators (unauthorized changes, suspicious engineering workstation activity, abnormal protocol usage where monitored)
• Access control risk indicators (privileged account anomalies, MFA bypass events, shared account usage, stale admin accounts)
• Control health indicators (EDR coverage gaps on in-scope endpoints, logging pipeline failures, time sync issues affecting correlation)
• Vulnerability/exposure indicators (critical vulns on in-scope assets, exposed remote services, insecure configurations)
• Third-party dependency indicators (MSSP monitoring outage, OEM remote support channel issues, critical SaaS degradation supporting operations)

Deliverable: Operational Cyber Conditions Catalogue mapped to each critical operation.

Step 3: Instrument monitoring and alerting around critical operations

Align telemetry sources to the catalogue. Focus on “decision-grade” signals:

• Log sources and sensors: identity, privileged access, remote access gateways, boundary firewalls, endpoint/EDR where applicable, OT monitoring tools if deployed, ticketing/CMDB for asset context.
• Alert rules tuned to critical operations: separate “critical ops” alert queue or tags.
• On-call and escalation: define who gets paged, and when.

Minimum operating expectation: Alerts must reliably become tickets with owners and timestamps. If you cannot trace alert → ticket → remediation/decision, you will struggle to prove the requirement.

Deliverables:

• Monitoring coverage matrix (critical operation × telemetry sources × gaps)
• Alert routing rules and escalation policy
• Alert-to-ticket workflow documentation (with examples)

Step 4: Stand up operational risk briefings (the control that makes this auditable)

C2M2-oriented programs often succeed fastest with a standing cadence of operational risk briefings supported by monitoring and alerting ¹. Make the briefing operational, not performative.

Briefing agenda (repeatable template):

1. Active conditions affecting critical operations (top risks; what changed since last briefing)
2. Material incidents and near-misses (and residual risk)
3. Control health exceptions (monitoring blind spots, logging outages, tool downtime)
4. Critical remediation status (patch windows, access revocations, segmentation work)
5. Third-party issues affecting monitoring or operations
6. Decisions needed (risk acceptance, downtime approval, compensating controls)

Deliverables:

• Briefing charter (purpose, attendees, decision rights)
• Briefing deck or briefing notes template
• Decision log (what was decided, by whom, when, and why)

Step 5: Validate the loop with exercises and sampling

Prove the loop works:

• Sample recent alerts affecting critical operations and confirm ticket lifecycle, triage notes, and closure evidence.
• Run a short scenario-based drill: “loss of remote access,” “suspicious privileged login,” or “monitoring outage for critical segment.” Capture actions and decisions.

Deliverables:

• Quarterly sampling results (or equivalent cadence you set)
• Drill records and after-action items

Step 6: Operationalize evidence collection (make audits low-friction)

Use a defined evidence calendar and named control owners. In Daydream, this typically becomes a recurring evidence request tied to the monitoring and briefing controls, so you collect the same artifacts consistently rather than scrambling per audit.

Required evidence and artifacts to retain

Keep artifacts that prove visibility, relevance to critical operations, and action:

Evidence item	What it proves	Good format
Critical Operations Register	Defined scope and owners	Controlled document, versioned
Monitoring coverage matrix	Visibility mapped to critical operations	Spreadsheet/export with gaps noted
Alerting rules and routing	Alerts are designed to detect conditions and reach owners	Configuration exports, screenshots, runbooks
Alert-to-ticket samples	Visibility becomes action	Ticket IDs linked to alert IDs, timestamps, closure notes
Operational risk briefing records	Leadership/ops awareness and decisions	Deck/notes + attendance + decision log
Escalation/on-call policy	Clear response path	Runbook with contact rotation
Control health logs	You detect monitoring failures	Tool uptime records, logging pipeline alerts
Risk acceptance records (if any)	Decisions are governed	Signed approvals or meeting minutes

Common exam/audit questions and hangups

Questions you should be ready for:

• “Show me your definition of critical operations and how it was approved.”
• “Which cyber conditions do you monitor that could impact those operations?”
• “Where are your monitoring gaps and what compensating controls exist?”
• “Walk me through one alert that affected critical operations from detection to closure.”
• “How do you ensure operations leadership receives timely, actionable updates?”
• “What happens if your monitoring tooling fails?”

Hangups that trigger findings:

• No explicit mapping between critical operations and monitoring coverage.
• Alert fatigue with no prioritization for operational impact.
• Briefings exist but are disconnected from live telemetry and ticket outcomes.

Frequent implementation mistakes (and how to avoid them)

1. Mistake: Treating situational awareness as a dashboard project.
   Fix: Make it a decision-and-action loop with traceable tickets and a decision log.

2. Mistake: Monitoring everything except the operational choke points.
   Fix: Start with remote access, identity, segmentation boundaries, and the systems that operators depend on to run the mission.

3. Mistake: No visibility into visibility failures.
   Fix: Create alerts for logging pipeline breaks, sensor outages, and data latency. Track these as operational risks.

4. Mistake: Third-party blind spots.
   Fix: Put critical third-party dependencies into the conditions catalogue (for example, “MSSP feed outage”) and include them in the briefing.

5. Mistake: Evidence is scattered across teams.
   Fix: Assign a control owner and an evidence owner. Centralize artifacts in a GRC workspace; Daydream can manage recurring evidence collection tied to the requirement.

Enforcement context and risk implications

No public enforcement cases were provided in the source catalog for this requirement. Treat the risk as operational: weak situational awareness increases the chance that cyber conditions degrade critical operations before you detect them, and it weakens your ability to defend incident handling decisions after the fact ¹.

Practical 30/60/90-day execution plan

Days 1–30: Scope and minimum viable visibility

• Publish a Critical Operations Register with named owners.
• Create the Operational Cyber Conditions Catalogue for each critical operation.
• Document current telemetry sources and build the monitoring coverage matrix.
• Stand up alert-to-ticket linkage for critical-ops-tagged alerts.
• Draft the operational risk briefing charter and a one-page template.

Exit criteria: You can show at least one end-to-end example where a condition affecting a critical operation produced an alert, a ticket, and an owner action.

Days 31–60: Briefings and governance

• Start the operational risk briefing cadence with operations attendance.
• Implement escalation policy and on-call expectations for critical-ops alerts.
• Add control health monitoring (logging gaps, sensor outages).
• Begin evidence retention routines (briefing notes, decision log, sampling pack).

Exit criteria: Two briefings completed with recorded decisions and follow-ups tied to tickets.

Days 61–90: Close gaps and harden proof

• Remediate top monitoring gaps identified in the matrix.
• Tune alerts based on false positives and missed detections tied to critical operations.
• Run a targeted drill and record after-action items.
• Build an “audit packet” folder with the required artifacts and a short narrative.

Exit criteria: You can answer auditor walkthrough questions with a clean evidence trail and show continuous improvement actions.

Frequently Asked Questions

What counts as “critical operations” for this operational situational awareness requirement?

Treat critical operations as the services or processes where cyber disruption creates unacceptable mission, safety, or systemic impact. Document the list, the owners, and the supporting systems so monitoring scope is defensible ¹.

Do we need a SOC or a SIEM to meet the requirement?

The requirement is outcome-focused: you need visibility and actionability for conditions affecting critical operations ¹. A SOC/SIEM can help, but auditors will still expect evidence of alert routing, ownership, briefings, and decisions.

How do we prove situational awareness without overwhelming leaders with noise?

Use a conditions catalogue tied to critical operations and filter briefings to items that change operational risk or require decisions. Keep the raw alerts in tooling; summarize risk, impact, and actions in the briefing record.

What evidence is most persuasive in an exam?

Alert-to-ticket traceability plus briefing records tied to those tickets usually lands best. Add a decision log and a monitoring coverage matrix that shows known gaps and remediation plans.

How should we handle third-party dependencies in situational awareness?

Include critical third parties as conditions to monitor (tool outages, degraded service, lost telemetry) and bring those into briefings when they affect critical operations. Retain third-party incident notices and internal tickets as evidence.

Where does Daydream fit if we already have security tools?

Daydream helps on the compliance operating layer: assigning control owners, collecting recurring evidence (briefings, samples, coverage matrices), and keeping an audit-ready trail without manual chasing across teams.

Related compliance topics

• 2025 SEC Marketing Rule Examination Focus Areas
• Access and identity controls
• Access Control (AC)
• Access control and identity discipline
• Access control lifecycle management

Footnotes

1. DOE C2M2