What is the NIST Cybersecurity Framework?
The NIST Cybersecurity Framework is a set of voluntary standards developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)—a federal agency under the U.S. Department of Commerce. It helps organizations across industries manage and reduce cybersecurity risk, especially those operating in critical infrastructure sectors such as banking, healthcare, and utilities.
When professionals refer to "the NIST Framework,", they mean one of the three primary documents:
- NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF): This framework focuses on industries vital to national and economic security, including energy, banking, communications, and the defense industrial base.
- NIST 800-53: This framework is primarily relevant to federal agencies as they work to become and stay compliant with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), and is best known for providing a deep dive into each of the act’s high-level requirements.
- NIST 800-171: This framework is directly related to 800-53, and provides guidance on security practices and controls that federal agencies must implement. It typically focuses on a narrow subset of organizations that handle Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI).
While only some of these frameworks are mandatory for federal agencies or government contractors, all three offer best practices that can benefit any organization seeking to strengthen it's cybersecurity program.
Goals of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework
The NIST Cybersecurity Framework was created to help organizations of all sizes and industries manage cybersecurity risks more effectively. Its core goal is to provide a flexible, repeatable, and industry-agnostic structure that enables organizations to align their cybersecurity activities with business objectives, risk tolerance, and regulatory requirements.
By using this framework, organizations can:
- Improve communication and alignment between technical teams and business stakeholders
- Evaluate current cybersecurity maturity and identify gaps
- Prioritize cybersecurity investments based on risk impact and business needs
- Build a common language around cybersecurity for internal and external reporting
- Support regulatory compliance efforts by mapping NIST principles to frameworks like HIPAA, ISO/IEC 27001, SOC2, and FedRAMP
Whether used in the public or private sector, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework enables organizations to move from reactive to proactive security postures—ultimately supporting cyber resilience, governance, and trust in digital operations.
What are the main components of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework?
The NIST Cybersecurity Framework is in place to help organizations determine what processes and controls are most relevant to their unique challenges, and how best to implement and test the efficacy of the security measures they put in place. The framework classifies its key points into six components:
- Identify: This component is all about identifying what needs to be protected. Gain visibility on what is being managed and how, and what needs to be added to the list of manageable functions.
- Protect: This component stipulates what capabilities and technology will be leveraged in protecting the identified functionalities or minimizing the impact resulting from a breach or other incident.
- Detect: This component centers on detection capabilities within the security organization and their relative strength in picking up anomalous signatures that could indicate a threat.
- Respond: This component ensures an organization has in place the capability to prioritize a threat or incident and aptly respond so that potential fallout and disruption to operations is minimized.
- Recover: This component brings in line a security operation center’s (SOC’s) ability to recover from an incident in a timely manner. Reporting is a critical subcomponent here, so that learnings can be implemented and playbooks for similar attack paths can be followed in the future.
- Govern: The newest component to NIST’s framework, the govern component asks – according to NIST – “how an organization ensures responsible governance and how a governance system reviews and achieves accountability,” here speaking directly to the area of cybersecurity and the systems in place to ensure a SOC is operating at optimal posture.
How to implement the NIST Cybersecurity Framework
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to implementing the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. Each organization will have different needs based on its size, industry, regulatory obligations, and security maturity. However, NIST provides structured guidance to help any organization align its people, processes, and technologies to the framework's core components.
A common starting point is assessing your organization’s current security posture using the NIST Implementation Tiers—a tool designed to help evaluate cybersecurity maturity and guide future improvements.
Understanding the NIST Cybersecurity Tiers
The NIST Cybersecurity Framework defines four Tiers that organizations can use to assess how well they manage cybersecurity risk today—and where they want to be in the future. These Tiers help provide context around risk management practices, threat awareness, and governance maturity.
According to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 Quick-Start Guide: the Tiers “can help provide context on how an organization views cybersecurity risks and the processes in place to manage those risks. The Tiers can also be valuable when reviewing processes and practices to determine needed improvements and monitor progress made through those improvements.”
Hers's a summary of each Tier:
- Tier 1) Partial: Businesses aligning with this tier have very little knowledge of cybersecurity practices and wouldn’t know how to respond in the case of a security event.
- Tier 2) Risk-Informed: Businesses aligning with this tier have an idea of the major categories of security events, but do not possess a security operations center from which to create or strategize cybersecurity best practices.
- Tier 3) Repeatable: Businesses aligning with this tier are beginning to implement some cybersecurity best practices and are striving to create repeatable processes that a team can leverage in detection and response protocols.
- Tier 4) Adaptive: Businesses aligning with this tier have incorporated advanced security concepts into their daily operations and are able to adapt to most security events as well as enact proactive capabilities to seek out the next threat and extinguish it.
When selecting a Tier, NIST recommends considering several organizational factors including:
- Current risk management practices
- The evolving threat environment
- Legal and regulatory requirements
- Business and mission objectives
- Information sharing practices
- Supply chain dependencies
- Resource constraints
The goal isn't to reach Tier 4 immediately, but rather to understand where your organization stands today—and chart a path forward based on risk tolerance, maturity, and capacity.