National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) frameworks are powerful tools for enterprises to navigate the increasingly complex web of security and compliance. As cloud environments grow quickly and scale, NIST standards can help businesses strengthen their compliance posture and secure their most sensitive data.
Being NIST-compliant means adhering to the institute’s resources, like their Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), Special Publications, and Risk Management Framework (RMF).
This checklist is a simplified guide to becoming NIST-compliant and reinforcing the most critical security pillars. With these industry-leading recommendations from our cloud security trailblazers, you’ll be ready to tackle the mounting regulatory pressures companies face today.
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Achieving NIST compliance in 9 steps
The following is a detailed 9-step guide to becoming NIST-compliant and improving your cloud’s security and regulatory posture.
1. Access control (AC)
Cloud environments are increasingly complex, which means you need controls in place so that only legitimate users can access your sensitive data. This limits or altogether prevents uninvited or unauthorized parties from getting into your system.
Without this type of enforcement, threat actors can more easily hijack overprivileged human and machine identities to move laterally in your cloud environments, causing data breaches and major data privacy violations.
The bottom line? A secure architecture, mechanisms, and policies behind permissions and privileges are a must to be NIST-compliant.
Actionable items
User authentication: Introduce authentication protocols like multi-factor authentication (MFA), 2-factor authentication (2FA), and single sign-on (SSO) for all your cloud users.
Role-based access controls (RBAC): Enact the principle of least privilege, meaning your cloud users only get the bare minimum role- or project-based privileges required for their primary duties.
Account management: Make sure to decommission dormant and unnecessary accounts and right-size permissions for overprivileged users.
2. Identification and authentication (IA)
Identification is your first line of defense. To prevent threat actors and malicious users from infiltrating your cloud environments, every legitimate user in your organization has to have a dedicated digital identity. Only employees with valid digital identities should be granted access to cloud resources.
But what exactly is a digital identity? It’s usually more than just one thing. A username and password is the simplest form of digital ID, while biometric requirements, like a facial or thumbprint scan, take it to a more advanced level. A digital ID is part of good credential hygiene, which is critical to keeping your system secure.
Actionable items
Unique identification: Provision unique digital identities for every user and device that accesses your cloud environments.
Credential management: Protect and manage credentials securely by using unified strategies, tools, policies, and practices, especially in multi-tenant cloud architectures.
Authentication mechanisms: Establish strong and multi-layered authentication mechanisms like password policies and biometrics to provide safe access to cloud resources.
A powerful CIEM solution is the ideal tool for managing steps 1 and 2 in this guide.
3. Incident response (IR)
As your organization might have noticed, the cloud threat landscape is relentless, and incidents are sadly inevitable. Given this reality, you need to beef up your IR capabilities to make sure that you can bounce back from security events without a hitch.
Typical phases in an IR lifecycle include:
Preparation
Detection and analysis
Containment
Eradication and recovery
Post-incident activity
With a strong IR plan in place, you’ll minimize the blast radius of attacks, seamlessly restore operations to avoid downtime, and prevent financial fallouts post-incident.
Plus, IR includes specific policies and individual playbooks with step-by-step instructions for specific types of attacks.
Actionable items
Incident reporting: Establish protocols for discovering, prioritizing, and reporting on different types of cloud security incidents.
Incident response planning: Work with key security stakeholders to write up a step-by-step IR plan specifically designed for cloud security threats; include individual playbooks for the different tools, tactics, and procedures threat actors use.
Recovery and containment: Establish strong processes and protocols to minimize the impact after an incident and get back to normal operations ASAP.
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4. Configuration management (CM)
To be NIST-compliant in the cloud, the right configurations across your cloud platforms, applications, and databases are a must! Your typical cloud environment is rife with countless misconfigurations, so you have to prioritize them. Wasting time on low-risk misconfigurations is a security and compliance weakness in itself.
CM involves establishing baseline configurations across your cloud environment. It also helps to continuously detect and remediate misconfigurations across your entire software development lifecycle, from build to runtime.
Actionable items
Cloud configuration baselines: Maintain and update secure configuration baselines for all cloud environments, e.g., infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS).
Patch management: Regularly patch and update outdated or misconfigured cloud infrastructure and applications—so you’re not left having to deal with full-fledged incidents.
Automated configuration tools: Leverage automation for consistent configuration monitoring and enforcement across cloud resources like VMs, databases, containers, and serverless.
Your best bet is a CSPM tool. This will give you custom rules, context-based real-time detection and response, and a compliance heatmap—all ideal for CM in the cloud.
5. System and information integrity (SI)
SI is all about the accuracy, effectiveness, and consistency of your enterprise cloud infrastructure, resources, and data. It measures how well your cloud environment can withstand and mitigate threats, like malware and unapproved access, that can negatively impact the integrity of your systems and data. This means replacing periodic improvement cycles with continuous improvements.
Strengthening SI will not only make sure you’re NIST-compliant. It also means your underlying cloud infrastructure and the data it generates, stores, ports, and leverages will be trustworthy.
Actionable items
Vulnerability scanning: Regularly conduct vulnerability scans on cloud resources, including virtual machines, containers, and APIs.
Malware protection: Follow and regularly update malware protection mechanisms across your cloud infrastructure.
Continuous monitoring and auditing: Keep your ear to the ground! You need to uncover suspicious activities or potential data breaches before they escalate.
6. Security assessment and authorization (SA&A)
A critical component of NIST’s RMF, this process begins with analyzing and evaluating the efficacy of security measures and controls across your cloud estate. We are talking about security tools, technologies, policies, and procedures—all of it comes into play.
The question you need to answer is: “Are my security tools and controls functioning effectively and as intended?”
Of course, answering this question is just one half of the SA&A puzzle. Setting up secure authorization is the second half. Ask yourself: What level of risk level can your company accept? Your response will dictate your organization’s risk appetite and ensure your cloud services and infrastructure are only authorized if any assessed risks fall within set parameters.
Actionable items
Risk assessments: These need to take place regularly to identify cloud-native security risks fast and measure just how sturdy your security and compliance posture really is.
Security authorization: Set up a process for authorizing new cloud services or infrastructure only after meticulous security assessments.
Penetration testing: Regular penetration testing will uncover any vulnerabilities hidden away in your cloud services, security tools, and other technologies.
7. Data protection and privacy (DPP)
Nowadays, organizations are awash in people’s personal data: PII, PHI, PCI, secrets, and intellectual property—you need to protect it all! With malicious actors causing nearly 300 million data leaks in 2023 alone, DPP is one of today’s most crucial aspects of NIST compliance and safe cloud operations.
Data protection means being ready for all sorts of threats: exfiltration, corruption, loss, and exposure. Data privacy is how you guarantee your customers’ data is secure. By addressing both protection and privacy, you not only ensure data security but also demonstrate adherence to data privacy laws and regulations.
You want a DSPM tool that serves as an ally in your DPP efforts. That means one that can discover and classify data, reduce data risks, and assess your compliance status against various data security frameworks.
Actionable items
Data encryption: You need industry-standard algorithms for encrypting data at rest and in transit.
Data classification: Different cloud and business contexts demand different security controls and criticality ranking.
Data retention and disposal: Be aware of your regulatory requirements and design appropriate policies for data retention, disposal, and destruction.
8. Audit and accountability (AU)
What exactly is happening in your cloud environments? This is what AU answers. It lets you know about every single action performed by every single user, and why they’re doing them. Why is it important? Because it ensures the integrity, security, and performance of cloud-based information systems.
Audit records are especially crucial when suspicious or non-compliant activities go down. With comprehensive audit trails, you can easily identify the root cause of a security or non-compliance incident and take care of it immediately.
Actionable items
Logging and monitoring: Establish and configure comprehensive logging mechanisms to track access requests and user actions within your cloud ecosystem.
Log retention: Are your logs stored securely and retained for the required duration specified by NIST? They better be.
Audit trails: Maintaining detailed audit trails means you have easy access to every single change made to your cloud resources and configurations.
9. Contingency planning (CP)
It’s a safe bet that your organization will face incidents. But the quality of your contingency plans will decide whether you have a disaster on your hands or can successfully intervene before it escalates. The primary objectives of CP are maintaining uptime, preventing data loss or compromise, and restoring mission-critical systems.
Proactive efforts and improvements are key here, so make sure to frequently conduct simulations of real-world cloud security incidents to test the effectiveness of your contingency plans. This includes testing backup mechanisms, cordoning off infected or compromised parts of your cloud environments to limit damage, and building comprehensive contingency playbooks for your CloudSec teams.
Actionable items
Disaster recovery: Create cloud deployment-specific contingency and disaster recovery playbooks to bounce back from unplanned events.
Business continuity: Make cloud services and security a top priority in your business continuity plan and strategy.
Cloud failover: Unfortunately, cloud outages or failures are inevitable. Having failover mechanisms in place to maintain availability will ease the pain.
How Wiz can help make NIST-compliance easier
NIST compliance can be made easy with a unified CNAPP solution like Wiz. Its unified capabilities, including CIEM, CSPM, CDR, and DSPM, will solidify every aspect of your cloud security and compliance.
For starters, Wiz enables continuous and automated compliance assessments of your cloud environments against NIST frameworks. Plus, you’ll have more than 100 other built-in compliance frameworks and customizable frameworks at your fingertips!
With Wiz, you can intricately examine specific components of your cloud estate against individual frameworks. For example, you can zero in on a specific business unit to check if they are NIST-compliant. Wiz also generates detailed reports that help with everything from audits to high-level strategy.
Using Wiz’s compliance heatmap is another tool that helps you on your journey to NIST compliance. It gives you a clear picture of how well your cloud environment is sticking to both NIST and other internationally recognized frameworks. You can also easily conduct cross-framework assessments (for example, NIST+CIS).
In short, Wiz simplifies and streamlines cloud compliance management. Sure, NIST frameworks and standards are immensely useful for businesses, but it takes a comprehensive cloud security platform like Wiz to achieve the ironclad compliance posture companies need today.
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