Why Every Industry Needs a STIG-Level Security Mindset

As in every previous year, cyberattacks were up again in 2025, intensified by AI-powered attacks and increasingly sophisticated ransomware tactics. Key trends included double extortion, supply chain attacks, distributed denial of service, phishing and the exploitation of IoT vulnerabilities. In an unsurprising turn of events, the US was one of the world’s primary targets.

If the income of cybercrime were measured against the most successful nations, it would constitute the world’s third largest economy with damages totaling $10.3 trillion in 2025. That’s up from $3 trillion in 2015. The World Economic Forum reports that more than 70% of cyber leaders believe that small businesses have reached a point where they can no longer adequately secure themselves on their own.

The tipping point has been passed. Cyber threats will keep accelerating. And attackers don’t care who you are. They don’t care if your company is big or small. Or whether you’re in the DoD or in education or manufacturing. Because vulnerabilities are vulnerabilities, money is money and every organization faces the same kind of constraints that keep them vulnerable, whether it’s staffing shortages technical complexity or audit pressure.

What separates resilient organizations from vulnerable ones is discipline when it comes to cyber readiness. This is best illustrated by the practice used to establish and maintain Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) in the DoD. While most organizations may not require all the STIG-level controls, adopting a STIG-level rigor of consistency, reliability and standards-based discipline is becoming critical as the climate escalates.

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What it means to adopt a STIG-level mindset.

When we talk about adopting a STIG-level mindset or STIG-level rigor, it has nothing to do with the DoD or the Guides themselves. It has to do with the posture and discipline the DoD maintains that makes their data among the safest on earth.

Whether you follow STIG, CIS Benchmarks or NIST 800-53 standards—or even your own internal baselines—a STIG mindset and rigor means having the technology and processes in place to expect drift, detect it quickly, eliminate it consistently and enforce controls with repeatable precision.

A STIG mindset treats configuration management as a continuous readiness activity, rather than a point-in-time audit task. In fact, one of the key leaps leaders have to make in their minds is that compliance and readiness are not destinations they will eventually reach. They are journeys that never end. Daily maintenance is as key to cyber health as daily brushing is to oral health.

Another key to the STIG-level mindset is adopting a standard. Standards are the fastest path to cyber readiness because they have done all the groundwork for you. Today’s most recognized frameworks—STIG, CIS Benchmarks, NIST—have been proven, tested and forged on the fire. They provide a roadmap with clear expectations, defined controls, repeatable structure and audit-ready evidence trails to help you build your most impenetrable and measurable results yet.

One approach that is no longer sustainable for you in 2026.

Another element that is key to the STIG-level mindset is automation. Automation is the secret sauce to DoD-level success and here’s why. Manual processes:

• Create inconsistencies and errors in execution
• Forge an environment friendly to drift as a result
• Generate backlogs from the amount of time they require
• Cause burnout from repetitive tasks, lending to more user error
• Support inconsistent and siloed efforts throughout the enterprise
• Hobble remediation and compliance times
• Spawn audit surprises at inconvenient moments

When your adversary is as precise and relentless as the AI that is being used in today’s attacks, your response has to be as precise and relentless. DoD-level rigor requires the consistent foundation of an automated response. It requires the speed and readiness of an automated response. Manual processes can no longer keep up with adversarial tactics.

STIG, CIS Benchmarks and NIST automation alone isn’t enough.

Automation can mean a lot of things. In the context of a STIG-level mindset, it refers to unified automation. Unified automation is a single approach or solution that is purpose-built from the ground up to scan your system for vulnerabilities, remediate according to your customized policies, capture artifacts for reporting and auditing, and maintain your secure baseline with minimal intervention.

Organizations that are currently using one-off tools like a scanning tool in conjunction with manual means are finding themselves dealing with rework and inconsistencies that put their data at risk. As momentum keeps rolling in the favor of cybercrime, unified automation levels the field and acts as a force multiplier:

• Apply the same controls the same way across systems
• Detect and remediate drift faster
• Use frameworks to reinforce each other, rather than duplicating work
• Eliminate weeks and months from your compliance cycles
• Ease the mental health burden on your teams
• Eliminate human error and rework
• Turn standards into repeatable practices
• Become continually compliant and audit-ready

Building a STIG-level mindset outside the DoD.

In the DoD, a STIG-level mindset isn’t optional. It’s mandated. It’s overseen. And it has been honed to meet the particular needs of national defense.

In healthcare, that may translate to strengthening data protection with repeatable CIS Benchmarks enforcement. In Education it might mean managing sprawling, decentralized IT environments and establishing consistent baselines. In Critical Infrastructure it would involve maintaining uptime through predictable, validated configurations. And in State and Local Governments it might mean building NIST-aligned programs with CIS Benchmarks consistency.

Your industry—and your particular infrastructure—is going to dictate your needs. The good news is that, between STIGs, CIS Benchmarks and NIST, you can find a standardized framework that works for your enterprise. And unified automation can make it easy to implement and maintain. In fact, many are now leveraging unified automation to implement STIGs and CIS Benchmarks in full in just 100 days.

To begin building a STIG-level mindset:

• Pick a standard appropriate for your industry. CIS Benchmarks and NIST 800-53 will be appropriate for most, while those in sensitive supply chains might consider STIGs.
• Baseline your environment. Understand drift, gaps, and inconsistencies, and establish a plan to eliminate them.
• Eliminate tool sprawl where possible. Unified automation will streamline tool use and enforce standards consistently throughout your enterprise.
• Shift from audit prep to continuous readiness. This is a logistical and practical shift from always trying to catch up to always being prepared.
• Measure what matters. Control performance, drift reduction, remediation speed and other variables that impact both your security and your overall program.

Stake your claim to the new differentiator in cyber readiness—discipline.

Discipline may not sound exciting or dramatic. But, then again, excitement and drama is exactly what you want to avoid in your cybersecurity program. With disciplined execution and a STIG-level mindset, your alerts will go quiet, compliance will become simplified and chaos will exit the building.

We have already passed the point of no return on manual compliance and homegrown frameworks. Organizations that embrace the speed, consistency, and readiness of unified automation will be able to move forward unimpeded while those that remain stuck in manual, fragmented approaches will continue to flirt with data loss, service interruptions, financial loss and damage to their brands.

For a deeper dive into unified automation and why having a STIG-level mindset is so critical in 2026 and beyond, download SteelCloud’s white paper, Unified Compliance Automation—A Force Multiplier for Cyber Readiness.