Recital 6 Level playing field in the EU

The entities involved in the provision of essential services means a service which is crucial for the maintenance of vital societal functions, economic activities, public health and safety, or the environment; are increasingly subject to diverging requirements imposed under national law. The fact that some Member States have less stringent security requirements on those entities not only leads to various levels of resilience means a critical entity’s ability to prevent, protect against, respond to, resist, mitigate, absorb, accommodate and recover from an incident; but also risks means the potential for loss or disruption caused by an incident and is to be expressed as a combination of the magnitude of such loss or disruption and the likelihood of occurrence of the incident; negatively impacting the maintenance of vital societal functions or economic activities across the Union and leads to obstacles to the proper functioning of the internal market. Investors and companies can rely on and trust critical entities means a public or private entity which has been identified by a Member State in accordance with Article 6 as belonging to one of the categories set out in the third column of the table in the Annex; that are resilient, and reliability and trust are the cornerstones of a well-functioning internal market. Similar types of entities are considered as critical in some Member States but not in others, and those which are identified as critical are subject to divergent requirements in different Member States. That results in an additional and unnecessary administrative burden for companies operating across borders, in particular for companies active in Member States with more stringent requirements. A Union framework would therefore also have the effect of levelling the playing field for critical entities means a public or private entity which has been identified by a Member State in accordance with Article 6 as belonging to one of the categories set out in the third column of the table in the Annex; across the Union.