What are security baselines and what is their importance to cybersecurity programs?
Security baselines are concepts that express minimum security requirements that are necessary to safeguard the confidentiality, integrity and availability (CIA) and other security issues for a particular security configurations in an organization. Moreover, it is a minimum set of security controls that organizations employ to protect their information and information systems. And it serves as a benchmark and ensures minimum security standard on identified and classified assets. Besides, it helps organizations to protect the assets with similar security posture and helps to address the privacy of sensitive data. Moreover, it enables an organization to audit processes and security controls to ensure their effectiveness and to determine whether the assets remain in secure state. And it provides a set of security controls and processes that an organization can establish to create a secure starting point for their classified assets. Organizations employ scoping and tailoring approaches to identify and select the best and cost-effective security controls to implement after establishing security baselines.