What is the NIST Cybersecurity Framework?
The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) is a set of guidelines developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to help organizations manage cybersecurity risk. It provides a flexible structure that can be applied across industries and organizational sizes to improve cyber resilience.
The framework consists of five core functions: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover. Each function includes categories and subcategories that describe key cybersecurity outcomes and practices. While adoption is voluntary, the NIST CSF is widely used as a foundation for building comprehensive cybersecurity programs.
NIST CSF helps organizations assess current capabilities, set improvement goals, and establish priorities for managing risk. It also promotes alignment between technical controls and business objectives.
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NIST CSF Requirements
The framework is structured around five key functions. Tufin supports implementation of these functions where they intersect with network security policy management.
Identify
The Identify function helps organizations develop an understanding of their assets, environment, and risk. It includes activities such as asset inventory, governance, and risk analysis. For network teams, this means having complete visibility into all firewalls, routers, switches, and cloud security groups, along with understanding how they connect and what traffic flows between them. Tufin supports this function through real-time topology mapping and asset discovery.
Protect
The Protect function ensures that safeguards are in place to limit or contain the impact of a potential cybersecurity event. This includes implementing access controls, defining policies, segmenting networks, and maintaining protective technologies. Tufin enables these safeguards by allowing organizations to define a Unified Security Policy and enforce least-privilege access across firewalls and cloud environments. It also supports policy cleanup and hardening.
Detect
The Detect function focuses on identifying cybersecurity events in a timely manner. This includes monitoring for policy violations, unauthorized changes, or anomalies in security configurations. Tufin helps operationalize this function by continuously monitoring network policy enforcement. If a firewall rule or access path deviates from the approved policy, Tufin alerts the appropriate teams so they can respond quickly.
Respond
The Respond function includes actions to take when a cybersecurity incident is detected. It involves containing the threat, analyzing its impact, and correcting configurations to prevent further exposure. Tufin supports this by allowing teams to simulate the impact of proposed changes, identify potential exposure, and deploy corrective controls across all platforms using centralized workflows.
Recover
The Recover function ensures that organizations can restore capabilities after a cybersecurity incident. It includes recovery planning, improvements, and system resilience. Tufin contributes to this function through its high availability and disaster recovery options, which help ensure that policy enforcement and access governance remain operational during recovery.
Tufin and NIST CSF Compliance
With Tufin, you can implement and operationalize key NIST CSF functions across your hybrid network. You can identify assets, enforce access policies, detect violations, and respond to risks with speed and accuracy.
Discover assets and map your environment
Tufin provides a dynamic topology map of your entire network that makes it possible to evaluate all possible access paths across on-prem and cloud networks. This map is the foundation for risk analysis, segmentation design, and policy enforcement.
This gives you the visibility needed to assess and prioritize risk.
Enforce access policies and reduce exposure
Use Tufin’s Unified Security Policy to define which systems can communicate with each other and under what conditions. Using topology, Tufin evaluates the compliance of network configurations with these policies across the entire hybrid network. You can also use Tufin’s Rule Viewer and reports to analyze existing network configurations to remove overly permissive or redundant rules, and implement least-privilege access.
These controls help you prevent unauthorized access and enforce consistent safeguards.
Monitor compliance and identify violations
Tufin continuously monitors firewall and cloud policies against your defined rules. If a change violates the policy, you are alerted immediately. This allows you to catch risky access changes or misconfigurations before they create exposure.
This supports real-time awareness of network policy enforcement.
Simulate impact and respond with confidence
You can use Tufin to simulate the effect of proposed changes to network access controls before implementation. If a path introduces a violation, overly permissive access, or a risky configuration, it can be blocked or escalated for further evaluation before implementation. Tufin also allows you to apply corrective controls across the environment from a centralized platform.
This gives you the ability to take rapid, targeted action in response to incidents.
Maintain resilient policy management infrastructure
Tufin provides high availability and disaster recovery options in its Enterprise tier. This ensures that the policy management platform remains online and operational even during an outage.
This helps ensure that access governance continues uninterrupted during recovery operations.
