The desired security controls should be in place after following the steps described in How to establish security controls. However, the attack surface might change over time (new vulnerabilities arise, ciphers are not secure anymore, etc.) or new best practices are established. Therefore, it is important to constantly monitor and analyze your environment and adjust the configuration dynamically.
- Insights from this task may influence the following artifacts:
- Templates – If new settings must be enabled by default, they should be part of the templates.
- Enforce policies – Some settings may become deprecated or even prohibited. That could be enforced by a policy.
- Assess the active configuration – The active configuration must conform to the desired settings.
- Education and guidelines – Make sure that best practices and training material is always up-to-date.
- Blueprints – In certain cases, even the blueprint may be reconsidered.