Safeguard
Definition
The individual action item within a CIS Control. Each Safeguard specifies a concrete activity (for example, 'establish and maintain an accurate inventory of all enterprise assets') and is assigned to an Implementation Group. Controls contain multiple Safeguards.
- Level
- Individual action item within a CIS Control
- Example
- Maintain an inventory of enterprise assets
- Assigned to
- An Implementation Group
- Relation to Controls
- A Control contains multiple Safeguards
Common questions
Why are Safeguards grouped into Implementation Groups?+
Implementation Groups let organisations of different sizes and risk profiles prioritise which specific Safeguards to implement first, so a small organisation is not expected to meet the same Safeguard set as a large enterprise on day one.
How does a Safeguard relate to an audit finding in an incident response report?+
An auditor or incident responder often maps a gap they found, such as no asset inventory, back to the specific Safeguard it violates, which ties a concrete finding to a recognised control framework rather than leaving the finding as an unstructured observation.
Related terms
- CIS Benchmark
- A technology-specific configuration hardening guide published by CIS for operating systems, cloud services, databases, and applications. Each Benchmark provides Level 1 (broadly...
- CIS Controls Self-Assessment Tool (CSAT)
- A free web-based tool provided by CIS that allows organisations to score their current implementation status for each Safeguard and generate a...
- CIS Controls V8
- The eighth version of the CIS Critical Security Controls, released in May 2021. It consolidates 18 Controls and 153 Safeguards, reorganised from...
- Crosswalk
- A published table that aligns controls from two frameworks side by side to show which controls address the same security objective. NIST,...
- Implementation Group (IG)
- A CIS Controls concept that divides the 153 safeguards across three tiers by organisational size and risk profile. IG1 (56 safeguards) covers...