Strengthening Your Cyber Readiness CIS Benchmarks & STIGs
As the second half of the 2020s gets into full swing, expert cybersecurity predictions are rolling in.
Nearly everyone agrees attack surfaces will increase as AI—either your own or your attacker’s—will be used against you. Cross-platform attacks and semi-autonomous malware will be on the rise. Compliance expectations will increase and the burden of manual compliance will surpass its breaking point. And, as f5 Labs puts it, whatever happens will happen “faster and with more acronyms than ever before.”
The question is, are you ready?
Resilience and cyber readiness will be among the keywords for 2026 and beyond. And that transcends merely defending your system against attack. It now assumes attack and includes your ability to prepare for, withstand, respond to, and recover from cyber threats of every type.
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Setting the stage for increased cyber readiness in your organization.
Your cyber resilience is directly tied to the secure foundation you establish in your enterprise. A secure system is not only harder to penetrate with its reduced attack surface, but intrusions are easier to detect and contain.
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Two of the most recognized standardized frameworks available for establishing a secure configuration baseline, minimizing your attack surface, and providing a foundation for ongoing monitoring and governance are:
- STIG. Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) are developed by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) as a high-assurance, prescriptive security roadmap for DoD and other sensitive systems in the government and its supply chain. STIGs address more than 10,000 controls and endpoints for comprehensive coverage of any configuration and they are updated every three months with new fixes.
- CIS Benchmarks. Developed by the Center for Internet Security (CIS), CIS Benchmarks are a collection of over 100 configuration practice benchmarks across more than 25 product categories (such as routers, operating systems, cloud platforms). This consensus-based approach is culled from experts around the world and across public and private industry for a broad scope. They are updated regularly as needed.
Both STIGs and CIS Benchmarks are based on NIST 800-53 and provide proven, consistent controls across environments. If you are in a regulated industry, they make it possible for you to always be audit ready with documented policies, controls, inventories and accountability.
Better yet, with tools like you’d find in an automated solution, they enable visibility into your system to detect and remediate drift so you are continually compliant and your readiness is ongoing.
Roadblocks to readiness and how you
can overcome them.
So far it sounds easy. Follow the STIG or CIS Benchmarks roadmap and you’re golden. But, as we said earlier, that is becoming increasingly impossible to do manually, if you can even find the experts to do it—it’s time consuming, labor intensive and soul sucking. And using one-off tools in today’s complex and distributed environments leads to siloed and inconsistent results.
Then there is the constant monitoring for configuration drift, which can happen anytime there are updates or operational changes. And, if you are in a regulated industry, you need to be capturing documentation and artifacts from your compliance process every step of the way. It is not easy.
As threats become more sophisticated, persistent and robust, so should your response. Manual STIG and CIS Benchmarks compliance is a slow, error prone, costly and increasingly insufficient way to establish a foundation of readiness. Using a unified automation solution—one that has all the tools you need to scan, remediate, monitor and report purpose-built into a single solution—erases all the drawbacks of manual compliance and leaves more hardened security in its wake.
Five best practices for achieving cyber readiness.
As the world continues to spin faster and faster when it comes to cybersecurity and resilience, there are a few things you can do to swing the odds in your favor:
Establish clear readiness goals tied to your tolerance and the risks your organization and industry face
Align with globally recognized and established cybersecurity standards like NIST, STIG or CIS Benchmarks
Leverage automation to simplify hardening, minimize your attack surface, enable continuous compliance, establish audit-readiness, facilitate reporting, and eliminate errors
Integrate monitoring into your daily activities to control drift
Maintain strong governance and a practice of continuous improvement and program maturity
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Transform your readiness over the next few months.
Cyber readiness begins with a strong, standardized configuration baseline, which both STIG and CIS Benchmarks provide to world-class results. But how you implement those standards is just as important as the standards themselves.
A unified automation solution will ensure a tight implementation that keeps your organization compliant, secure and audit-ready over time. It will also give you greater visibility into your system, a more agile and contained responsiveness to threats, and swifter recovery if a breach does happen occur.
There is no more critical time to evaluate your readiness, identify gaps in your program and strengthen your organization’s overall security posture. With today’s unified solutions, anything from program maturation to complete transformation can be accomplished in just 100 days using  STIGs or CIS Benchmarks and automation. The bad guys aren’t hesitating. Nor should you.
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