NIST 800-53 compliance is the process of adhering to a cybersecurity framework developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to protect sensitive information and systems. It involves implementing security controls and best practices to mitigate risks and ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of critical assets.
In this post, we’ll explore why NIST 800-53 is an essential part of modern data protection and important to your cloud environment—along with some best practices so you can roll it out smoothly in your organization.
What is NIST 800-53, and who needs to comply with it?
Controls are security or privacy measures that protect data. They’re organized into families (categories) to ensure comprehensive security coverage.
NIST Special Publication (SP) 800-53, officially known as “Security and Privacy Controls for Information Systems and Organizations,” provides a set of security controls to help organizations meet the highest level of U.S. information security standards.
U.S. federal agencies must comply with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), which mandates information security programs. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) created NIST 800-53 to help organizations meet these requirements.
U.S. federal agencies and government contractors handling classified information have to comply with NIST 800-53. That’s because they may connect to federal servers, networks, or related IT systems. But some organizations, especially in highly regulated industries like healthcare, finance, and defense, may voluntarily adopt NIST 800-53. Others may choose less stringent standards like NIST 800-171. Or, for a much simpler, more flexible approach, consider the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF).
Why is NIST 800-53 important?
NIST 800-53's strong security controls meet FISMA compliance rules, protect sensitive data from cyber threats, and offer a high level of supply chain risk management.
Adopting NIST 800-53 not only gives you a thorough framework for privacy governance. It also helps you build a proactive security culture and make smarter security spending decisions thanks to risk-based assessments.
Examples of use cases for NIST 800-53 include:
Financial institutions (mandatory)
Banks handle sensitive customer data, including financial records, personally identifiable information (PII), and transaction histories. NIST 800-53 is mandatory in order to protect this data and comply with Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) regulations.
Healthcare organizations (mandatory)
Health insurance providers must safeguard protected health information (PHI), including medical records, claims processing information, and payment details. NIST 800-53 is mandatory in order to comply with HIPAA requirements.
Cloud service provider (voluntary)
Cloud service providers may seek to serve clients in regulated industries. Adopting NIST 800-53 will enhance security, boost the provider’s credibility and competitiveness, and help win government contracts.
Key components of NIST 800-53
NIST 800-53 organizes over 1,000 security controls into families, each containing specific base controls and optional enhancements. This framework helps you tailor your security measures to the risk level of their systems and data, categorized into impact levels, or baselines.
Controls, families, and baselines
Security controls are safeguards or measures that protect data and systems from threats and vulnerabilities. They can involve various methods, including security policies, procedures, automated tools, and human actions.
Control families combine controls focusing on a given security area. For example, the area of identification and authorization (IA) includes controls establishing security measures like multifactor authentication, single sign-on, device authentication, and more. There are 20 families in NIST 800-53.
In NIST 800-53, risk levels or impact levels are known as security control baselines. The three baselines are low, moderate, and high. Examples of control baselines include:
Low-level baseline: Access Control, AC-7, Unsuccessful Logon Attempts, which takes action including automated lockouts to block unauthorized users as well as DoS attacks.
Moderate-level baseline: System and Communications Protection, SC-23, Session Authenticity, which introduces session-level communications protection to defend against man-in-the-middle and other session-based attacks.
High-level baseline: Incident Response, IR-4(4), Information Correlation, which requires an organization to bring together information from different sources for a bigger-picture view into threat events. (This sounds complex but can be simplified by using a cloud native application protection platform, or CNAPP, that provides deep context and even AI-powered remediation.)
Organizations categorize their assets based on how much damage a security breach could cause, then apply relevant controls based on applicable baselines.
NIST 800-53 revisions
The current version of NIST 800-53, revision 5, was released in 2020. It includes new controls for privacy and supply chain security. Security is always changing based on emerging threats and new risks, and NIST standards need to keep pace. For example, AI is a new risk area that’s exploded since 2020, so the next version of NIST 800-53 will have to address data and privacy risks related to AI. NIST has already begun taking steps to help organizations secure AI systems, and the next revision of NIST 800-53 will undoubtedly address AI-related risk.
Keeping up with NIST isn’t always easy. You may also be responsible for compliance with other standards, like HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, and more. That’s why it’s a good idea to choose tools that help you stay on top of things, especially if those tools use automation. Automation will save time for your teams and reduce the chances of human error.
Control examples from NIST 800-53
With over 1,000 controls in the current version, NIST 800-53 revision 5, we don’t have the space to explore every one! Let’s look at three important families to see what kinds of controls you’ll find listed under each one.
| NIST 800-53 Rev. 5 Family | Purpose | Typical controls | Description | Enhancement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AC – Access Control | Manage access to resources and protect system components | AC-2: Account Management | Limit high-risk account types and implement strict controls for privileged accounts. |
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| AC – Access Control | Manage access to resources and protect system components | AC-3: Access Enforcement | Regulate access to system resources based on user roles and permissions. |
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| RA – Risk Assessment | Manage and mitigate risks to information systems | RA-5: Vulnerability Monitoring and Scanning | Conduct regular scans to identify and remediate system weaknesses. |
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| IR – Incident Response | Recover information systems and data following a disruption | IR-6: Incident Reporting | Ensure timely, comprehensive, and compliant reporting to meet all relevant regulations. |
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Best practices to implement NIST 800-53 in your organization
Conduct risk assessments
Familiarize yourself with your environment and conduct vulnerability assessments, penetration testing, and other assessments to identify and prioritize risks. Remember: Putting automation tools in place for these tasks will save you lots of time going forward.
Map relevant controls to your organization’s assets
Perform a comprehensive asset inventory—including cloud resources—and then determine which data is sensitive and needs extra layers of protection. Once you understand what assets you have, determine which NIST 800-53 standard controls and enhancements will provide you with the right degree of security coverage.
Determine access control
Implement an identity access management (IAM) solution to limit authorized users’ access and block unauthorized access with strict and consistent policies for access controls.
Continuously monitor compliance
Adopt automation to track networks and systems for threats and vulnerabilities, even across a multi-cloud environment. Choose metrics and KPIs to build accountability into your security program for continuous improvement in measurable goals like mean time to remediation (MTTR).
Wiz cloud compliance
Wiz is a cloud-native security platform designed to help organizations ensure compliance with industry standards and regulatory requirements. By leveraging its agentless architecture and deep visibility across cloud environments, Wiz simplifies cloud compliance and enables proactive risk management. Here's how Wiz supports cloud compliance:
Continuous Assessment
Wiz automatically assesses your compliance posture against over 100 industry-standard frameworks like CIS, PCI, NIST, HIPAA, and GDPR, as well as custom frameworks.This eliminates manual effort and complexity in dynamic cloud environments.
Reporting and Visibility
Generate executive reports on-demand or periodically for high-level posture assessment
Create detailed or high-level compliance reports with a single click
View a compliance heatmap for a bird's-eye view across all frameworks
Customization and Flexibility
Create custom frameworks from scratch or by modifying built-in templates
Assess compliance posture for different business units or applications
Tailor assessments to align with your organization's specific needs
Remediation
Drill down from standards to specific resource-level assessments
Receive remediation guidance for failed controls
Implement auto-remediation playbooks to fix recurring misconfigurations
Integration and Ease of Use
Connects in minutes without agents to major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.)
Integrates with messaging and ticketing platforms for efficient issue routing
Uses a single policy across all cloud environments for consistent assessment
100+ Built-In Compliance Frameworks
See how Wiz eliminates the manual effort and complexity of achieving compliance in dynamic and multi-cloud environments.
