Harness the NIST CSF to boost your security and compliance

The cybersecurity threat and the need to ensure compliance continue to loom large in the business world. Boards and management want to know the current status of their cybersecurity posture, but it can prove difficult to get straight answers.

Overworked cybersecurity teams often lack the resources to do a thorough job and the skills shortage is worsening year after year. When IT and cybersecurity professionals were surveyed by ESG , 51 percent of respondents claimed that their organization had a problematic shortage of cybersecurity skills, up from 45 percent in 2017.

In the face of an ever-changing threat landscape, security professionals can use all the help they can get, and an effective framework can prove enormously helpful.

NIST's Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) is a crowdsourced set of best practices to help you analyze your cyber risk posture and work towards improving it. The product of a partnership between some of the best cybersecurity talent from the public and private sectors, this framework can be overlaid on top of your existing risk management frameworks and security programs.

Because it's a customizable framework, it’s something that every organization can benefit from, irrespective of the type of business that they are in. It can also be usefully applied to small and mid-size businesses , not just large organizations. The NIST CSF encourages you to consider your business goals, understand your risk tolerance, and learn where your cybersecurity efforts should be focused.

And since better cybersecurity is a journey, rather than a destination, it also helps you measure your improvement over time, so you can see where you are, compared to where you want to be.

To get the most from the NIST CSF you need to build a solid foundation for its implementation and that starts with management buy-in. This framework enables you to take a risk-based approach to security and so you need to engage the business to best understand the potential impact of different threats. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution; it requires some tailoring.