The requirements of CSIRTs designated by the Member States are provided in Annex I of the NIS Directive. A CSIRT has to ensure a high level of availability of its communication services. Its premises and the supporting information systems shall be located in secure sites and be able to ensure business continuity. Moreover, the CSIRT should be enabled to participate in international cooperation networks. 3.5. Assistance for the development of CSIRTS. The Cybersecurity Digital Service Infrastructures (DSI) programme of the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) can provide for significant EU funding in assisting Member State CSIRTs to improve their capabilities and cooperating with each other through an information exchange co-operation mechanism. The cooperation mechanism under development in the SMART 2015/1089 project is intended to facilitate swift and effective operational cooperation on a voluntary basis between Member State CSIRTs, namely in support of the tasks entrusted to the CSIRTs Network under Article 12 of the Directive. Details of the relevant calls for proposals for capacity building of Member State CSIRTs are available via the website of the Innovation and Networks Executive Agency (INEA) of the European Commission.15 The CEF Cybersecurity DSI Governance Board provides an informal structure for policy level guidance and assistance to Member States' CSIRTs for the purpose of capacity building, and for the implementation of the voluntary cooperation mechanism. A newly established CSIRT or one appointed to fulfil the tasks at Annex I of the NIS Directive can rely on the advice and expertise of ENISA to improve its performance and efficiently deliver its work16. In this regard, it is worth to point out that Member State CSIRTs could take as a reference some of the work that ENISA has recently carried out. In particular, as listed in section 7 of this Annex, the Agency has issued a number of documents and studies describing good practices, recommendations at a technical level, encompassing CSIRT maturity level assessments, for various CSIRT capabilities and services. In addition, guidance and best practises have also been shared by networks of CSIRTs both at global (FIRST17) and European level (Trusted Introducer, TI18). 3.6. The role of the single point of contact. Pursuant to NIS Directive Article 8(3), each Member State must designate a national single point of contact, which will exercise a liaison function to ensure cross–border cooperation with the relevant authorities in other Member States and with the Cooperation Group and the CSIRT network19 created by the Directive itself. Recital 31 and Article 8(4) explain the rationale for this requirement, i.e., to facilitate cross-border cooperation and communication. This is particularly needed given that Member States may decide to have more than one 15 Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/inea/en/connecting-europe-facility See Article 9(5) NIS Directive. 17 Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (https://www.first.org/) 18 https://www.trusted-introducer.org/ 19 A network of national CSIRTs for operational cooperation between Member States under Article 12 16 18