The White House has released a preliminary set of incentives that will be offered to companies that operate critical infrastructure, such as power plants and companies, in exchange for joining a cybersecurity program chaired by the Homeland Security Department.

The document, published on Tuesday, states that these critical infrastructures are increasingly networked are are vulnerable to a wide range of threats, thus protecting them is the number one priority.

The program, dubbed the Cybersecurity Framework, is “a set of core practices to develop capabilities to manage cybersecurity risk. These are the known practices that many firms already do, in part or across the enterprise and across a wide range of sectors.”

The draft is expected to be completed in October and the final version is expected to be released by February 2014.  Afterwhich, a Voluntary Program will be launched  to help encourage critical infrastructure companies to adopt the Framework.

“Over the next few months, agencies will examine these options in detail to determine which ones to adopt and how, based substantially on input from critical infrastructure stakeholders,” the White House said in a blog post. “We believe that sharing the findings and our plans for continued work will promote transparency and sustain a public conversation about the recommendations.”

This is an executive order signed by the President after Congress failed to reach an agreement on cybersecurity legislation twice last year.  Since this is an executive order, it must stay within the parameters of existing law and cannot grant new powers or authorities.

According to the post, some of the  recommended incentives can be put in place quickly under existing authorities after the Voluntary Program is established, while others would require legislative action and additional maturation of the Cybersecurity Framework and Voluntary Program, along with further analysis and dialogue between the Administration, Congress, and private sector stakeholders, to be implemented.

Some of the incentives included are Cybersecurity Insurance, Grants, Process Reference, Liability Limitation, Streamline Regulations, Public Recognition, Rate Recovery for Price Regulated Industries, and Cybersecurity Research.

But how will this executive order affect future legislation regarding cybersecurity?

“I believe that under the right political conditions, with the successful trial out there, this could be a great stepping stone towards some type of a new cybersecurity legislation,” said SiliconANGLE Contributing Editor John Casaretto during an appearance on this morning’s Live NewsDesk Show with Kristin Feledy.  “Something that has a little more teeth to it, that has more incentives to jump into the program in the first place,  but also more structure in terms of what it offers to companies that participate, so perhaps it could expand to other industries.

“This continual feedback, the growth of this particular program — let’s see how it goes.  I think that would be big first step.  There’s a lot of push to make sure that this goes well and  from there, perhaps we could see a good chance that this actually happening in terms of official legislation in this country,” Casaretto stated.

For more of Casaretto’s Breaking Analysis, check out the NewsDesk video below: