What is NIST 800-53?

NIST SP 800-53 is short for the National Institute of Standards and Technology Special Publication 800-53. The NIST is a non-regulated agency within the U.S. Commerce Department and was made to assist and encourage innovation and science through maintenance and promotion of a group of industry standards.

NIST SP 800-53 is a group of guidelines and standards to help contractors and federal agencies meet requirements made by the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).

Another part of NIST’s mission is to have Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) in conjunction with FISMA. To assist federal agencies, the NIST has guidance documents under its Special Publications (800) series.

The 800 series reports the Information Technology Laboratory’s guidelines and research. Also, NIST SP 800-53 works with the safeguards or security controls for federal information organizations and systems.

Trust Model

A trust model in the NIST 800-53 is used to determine the trustworthiness of components and

How To Implement Nist 800-53?

Analyze: The first step to implement NIST 800-53 is understanding. You have to understand the underlying threats facing your information and data systems as well as their level of risk. Using solutions that will automate NIST 800 monitoring compliance is a great place to start. The main solutions in this space protect and analyze regulated data such as PHI, PCI, and PII.

Educate: You need to educate your employees about the process they have to undergo to become NIST compliant. For instance, there are management controls laid out in NIST 800-53 that your team has to be aware of. There are software tools that can help you train your employees on current security requirements and their best practices. These prompts can keep the users on their toes and prevent careless actions that will threaten organizational security.

Access: Companies talk about how they take information security and data seriously. But if you have no method of measuring your security processes and policies, how can you improve them? Deploy tools that will create a mechanism to assess and measure your security processes. Then you will be able to improve and iterate your security standards against the continuously evolving threats.

Conclusion

To conclude, you have to implement NIST 800-53 protocols in order for your organization to stay compliant. By doing so, not only are you keeping it safe from harm, but also preventing legal issues for not following federal standards.

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