The U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework is a voluntary framework, based on existing standards, guidelines, and practices. Its intention is to reduce cyber risks to critical infrastructure. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF) was developed with a focus on industries vital to national and economic security, including energy, banking, communications, and the defense industrial base.
Meanwhile, the NIST Special Publication 800-53 provides a catalog of security and privacy controls for all U.S. federal information systems except those related to national security. The NIST 800-53 controls set the security baseline for federal agencies and contractors, and are continuously updated to address new threats and to prevent major cybersecurity incidents.
When using Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or any other cloud service provider, security and compliance is a shared responsibility between the cloud provider and the customer. You as the customer are responsible for configuring and using cloud services in a way that complies with the applicable directives contained within NIST CSF and NIST 800-53.
InsightCloudSec enables you to automate security and compliance with NIST CSF and NIST 800-53. InsightCloudSec provides dozens of out-of-the-box policies as part of our NIST compliance packs that map back to specific directives within NIST CSF and NIST 800-53. For example, InsightCloudSec’s policy “Cloud Account Password Policy Missing” supports compliance with the “PR.AC-1” directive in NIST CSF. You can immediately use the NIST compliance packs to identify and remediate policy violations in real time.