Breaking Down NIST’s Cybersecurity Framework

Today’s businesses need an established cybersecurity strategy. It’s as simple as that.

However, many businesses need guidance to create this strategy, which is why the National Institute of Standards and Technology has developed a framework for proper cybersecurity protection. Let’s walk through this framework and discuss what you need to do to meet its requirements.

The NIST framework has five parts: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover.

Part One: Identify

If you don’t know your cybersecurity needs, you have almost no chance of meeting them. This makes it crucial that you fully appreciate the risks that every element of your business faces. Otherwise, how could you manage them?

Therefore, it is critical that you identify the context and the utility of each of your resources and the risks each faces, as this will help you establish what needs to be done to correct them. What assets do you rely on in terms of hardware and software? Where do you fall in your supply chain? What regulations do you need to meet, and what do they require of you? What must you do to minimize the vulnerabilities in your operations and across your supply chain?

This information will put you in a much better position for success, as the more data you have, the better you’ll be able to evaluate and prioritize your risks.

Part Two: Protect

Once you have a more complete picture of your cybersecurity situation, you can more effectively prevent threats from taking root. There are many tools you can (and, frankly, should) use to accomplish this:

• Access controls help minimize the risk of unauthorized access to your data and infrastructure.
• Similarly, data security helps keep critical information available to those needing it while maintaining its confidentiality otherwise.
• Establishing regular and proactive maintenance practices to ensure all updates are in place and devices experience optimal uptime.
• Training staff as appropriate based on their level of permission.

While NIST doesn’t explicitly include this, we also think it is wise to include some level of strategizing about how to resume operations after a potential event. Identify what you need to operate—as in, what you actually cannot function without—and figure out what it would take to resume an acceptable level of business operations. This will come in handy later.

Part Three: Detect

Unfortunately, there is always the chance that a cybersecurity incident will occur. If one does, you first need to know about it. This means you need to be able to spot the warning signs of such an event.

Committing to continuous monitoring and event detection will significantly simplify this process, as these events come with hallmarks and warning signs that can alert you to an issue. This also helps you ensure that your cybersecurity protections are functioning as expected, as an issue that should have been stopped being present tells you something isn’t working right.

These signs—which can take the form of cybersecurity events themselves—can significantly impact your business, making it critical to catch them quickly.

Part Four: Respond

Once you know that your business has been—or currently is—affected by a cybersecurity event, you need to act to minimize its impact. It is important to have a process to turn to in a high-stress event like this, so we recommend you establish recovery procedures ahead of time and train your team to enact them.

These procedures will help ensure that the response you’ve planned to deal with a given cybersecurity event is executed efficiently and effectively, from your actual mitigation and resolution of the issue to all the additional tasks that such events incite. You’ll need to establish communications with a host of external parties, including law enforcement and your clientele, to keep them apprised of the situation.

In addition, you’ll also need to evaluate your network to ensure that your situation doesn’t get worse and to gather as much information about the attack as possible. This data will be useful in better securing your business later.

Part Five: Recover

After the cybersecurity incident has been resolved, your work isn’t done. You need to get any interrupted services back in action, so you’ll want to use the strategy we discussed in the Protect phase. With it, you can take the steps necessary to resume your essential operations, restoring the most critical systems first and retrieving the data you need to utilize them. Take the time to properly implement these fixes based on what you have learned from the current situation.

As this is addressed, you must communicate again with your team, partners, and clientele. As appropriate, each group will need updates concerning your progress and the state of the business.

Your Security is Not Something to Take Lightly

If you’ve noticed, this is a pretty stringent and in-depth approach to your cybersecurity response. This is the point. You want to have every detail shored up before you deploy this kind of strategy. 

Frameworks like this one help you do that.

Security of all kinds, especially cybersecurity, is more important than ever, so frameworks like this are truly a resource to use as you design your business’ protections and cybersecurity strategy.

Microtechs is here to help. Learn more about what we have to offer by reaching out at (415) 246-0101.