What is CIS Compliance? Top Controls You Can’t Ignore

CIS compliance refers to conforming to the controls and benchmarks established by the Center for Internet Security (CIS), a nonprofit organization globally recognized for its cybersecurity tools, resources, and best practices guidance for securing IT systems and data from cyber threats. Achieving CIS compliance is more than a check-the-box exercise, though. It requires ongoing discipline, smart security configurations, automation, and around-the-clock monitoring solutions.

And it can’t wait.

The stakes have never been higher—or more expensive.

In 2024, IBM calculated that the average cost of a single data breach hit $4.88 million, the steepest price tag on record. Ransomware attackers have become equally ruthless, with Sophos finding that 59% of organizations have been hit in the past year. For many small and mid-sized businesses, the impact was severe—70% of those attacks resulted in encrypted data.

The best defense, as they say, is a good offense, like the battle-tested safeguards from the Center for Internet Security’s Critical Security Controls. In fact, the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report team routinely includes the CIS controls organizations should use against the most common attack vectors. When properly implemented, these controls harden your environment, simplify incident response, and satisfy insurers’ demanding, measurable cybersecurity standards. They also give you a common language to brief directors and auditors.

This guide will unpack what it really means to implement CIS guidance in a way that’s audit-ready and operationally effective. We’ll also break down how CIS and NIST compare—and show you how to streamline both with a unified approach.

By the end, you’ll have a clear playbook and a few ready-made talking points to elevate CIS compliance from a checked box to a competitive edge.

• What are CIS benchmarks?
• Why organizations fail CIS Benchmarks (and what to do about it)
• Which systems are covered by CIS benchmarks?
• What are CIS controls?
• Why is CIS compliance important?
• What is the difference between CIS and NIST?
• Why the choice is rarely “either-or” when it comes to effective compliance
• How can I implement CIS controls in my organization?
• What types of tools are commonly used to address CIS compliance?
• How Tanium helps with compliance

What are CIS benchmarks?

CIS benchmarks are secure configuration standards developed by CIS. You can think of CIS benchmarks as the “assembly instructions” for complex tech—except these are drafted and iterated on by a volunteer coalition of the world’s most security-obsessed cyber experts, software providers, vendors, and researchers, ensuring that the security recommendations remain practical, vendor-neutral, and continually up to date.

Benchmarks get into the gritty details of configuration parameters (e.g., file permissions, registry keys, kernel flags, service policies, etc.) for operating systems, cloud services, databases, and network devices, at two severity levels:

1. Level 1: A solid, low-friction baseline that closes common exposures while preserving compatibility with most business workloads
2. Level 2: A stricter “bring-your-own-helmet” profile intended for high-risk or heavily regulated environments where mandated auditing, encryption, and access controls increase functionality trade-offs

While benchmarks are guidelines, not regulatory requirements, the configurations they recommend are foundational—especially when misconfigurations go unnoticed.

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Why organizations fail CIS Benchmarks (and what to do about it)

Misconfigurations often dominate benchmark violations, but they’re frequently symptoms of deeper issues, such as incomplete asset inventories, patching delays, and poor privilege management.

For example, these issues typically map to CIS Controls 1, 2, 5, 7, and 8:

• Asset and software inventory (controls 1, 2)
  If a host, container, or SaaS tenant isn’t in your CMDB, it will never be scanned, and therefore, it will never meet the baseline in the first place.
• Vulnerability and patch management (control 7)
  A fully hardened Windows image drifts the moment an unpatched kernel ships. The next monthly scan lights up, but the culprit is lagging patch cadence, not the original build template.
• Privilege management and logging gaps (controls 5, 8)
  Over-permissive roles, missing multifactor authentication (MFA), or disabled audit logs rarely appear as “misconfiguration” in everyday speech, yet they’re precisely the settings that CIS flags.

Misconfiguration accounts for many violations because it’s where underlying controls are most visibly implemented—and where things start to break down. The good news is that benchmark content is open and consensus-driven, allowing updates to be rolled out quickly when new threats or software product versions emerge.

CIS Benchmarks can support compliance efforts for frameworks like HIPAA, PCI DSS, FedRAMP, and ISO 27001 by addressing many of the technical configuration requirements they include. However, they are not sufficient on their own to achieve full compliance. These frameworks typically require broader organizational controls, such as documented policies, risk assessments, and incident response procedures, that go beyond technical system hardening.

Want to see how real-time compliance reporting works? In this Tech Talk, Tanium experts walk through how to build custom compliance reports aligned with CIS Benchmarks—without stitching together siloed tools.

Now that we understand what a CIS benchmark is and why aligning with one is worthwhile, our next logical step is to put the baselines into practice.

CIS doesn’t stop at operating systems; its hardening templates span hypervisors, databases, cloud services, and even Kubernetes clusters. In the next section, we’ll map benchmarks to the platforms you’re most likely to run, so you can pinpoint which parts of your stack have a CIS safety net you can rely on.

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Which systems are covered by CIS benchmarks?

Developed and peer-reviewed by a global community of practitioners and vendors, the benchmarks spell out prescriptive, step-by-step guidance for more than 100 secure-configuration templates spanning over 25 vendor product families.

Many benchmark settings align with the CIS Critical Security Controls, enabling organizations to trace their configurations back to broader security objectives.

Here’s a look at the type and breadth of systems covered by CIS:

• Cloud platforms and infrastructure: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud
• Containers and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift
• Databases and server software: Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Apache HTTP Server, NGINX, VMware
• Operating systems: Windows, macOS, AIX, RHEL, Ubuntu, Rocky, AlmaLinux, Amazon Linux, IBM i, IBM Z
• Network and security appliances: Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Juniper, Check Point, Fortinet, F5, pfSense
• Mobile OSs: Android, iOS
• Desktop software and SaaS: Microsoft 365, Google Workspace
• Web browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Safari

Whether you’re spinning up a Kubernetes cluster, tightening firewall rules on a Cisco ASA, or hardening a Windows Server build, chances are high there’s a CIS benchmark ready to supply you with precise security configuration steps. That breadth and traceability make the benchmarks a reliable, audit-ready security hygiene across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

If CIS Benchmarks are the wrench—providing the technical means to tighten your security posture—then CIS Controls are the blueprint that tells you which bolts to tighten, in what order, and why. While Benchmarks focus on system configurations, Controls span a broader range of safeguards, including processes like incident response, user training, and access governance.

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What are CIS controls?

CIS controls v8.1 are a curated set of 18 safeguards (down from the original 20) that map common attack patterns to proven defensive actions. These are grouped into three Implementation Groups (IG1–IG3), allowing organizations to scale their maturity according to risk and available resources. IG1 aligns with essential cyber hygiene and is often used as a baseline for small- to mid-sized organizations.

Key themes include:

• Inventory and monitor every asset (i.e., hardware, software, cloud, and SaaS). Don’t let shadow IT become attacker IT.
• Apply secure baselines (e.g., CIS benchmarks) and automate drift detection.
• Minimize privileges and enforce strict credential hygiene to blunt the 22% of breaches that still begin with stolen or abused credentials, as determined by the 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report by Verizon.
• Identify and resolve vulnerabilities. The same data breach report also found that 20% of 2025 breaches originated from unpatched flaws, and that the mean-time-to-patch is 32 days—lots of time to plot an effective attack, especially on unmonitored edge devices and VPNs.
• Prepare and practice an incident response plan. The longer an attacker is inside your systems, the more doors they open. According to IBM, the average mean-time-to-remediation (initial compromise to full containment) for financial services is the longest, at 219 days—that’s over six months of undetected havoc.

Cybersecurity teams face no shortage of advice, but precious little of it comes with a step-by-step playbook. The CIS Critical Security Controls fill that gap, covering the entire security lifecycle—from secure configuration to continuous vulnerability management. Implementing these controls can help organizations mitigate known attacks and automate cyber defenses.

Learn how Tanium Risk & Compliance helps you operationalize CIS controls with real-time visibility and automated enforcement

It’s time to put it all together. In the next section, we’ll walk through that handshake: How do controls and benchmarks work together to become more than “secure configurations?” How do the what and how become audit-ready settings across the hybrid estate?

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Why is CIS compliance important?

CIS is not a regulatory organization but is often used to demonstrate conformance with regulatory frameworks, so compliance with the benchmarks and controls is not compulsory.

However, it’s a good idea to consider CIS for at least two significant benefits:

1. Hard-coding CIS benchmark security best practice settings into every operating system, network device, and cloud workload eliminates the easy wins cyber attackers crave.
2. CIS Controls are mapped to globally recognized frameworks, such as NIST and PCI DSS, helping organizations align their technical safeguards and security measures with broader compliance goals.

However, these mappings alone aren’t sufficient for audit readiness. Auditors typically expect more than alignment—they look for concrete, verifiable evidence of implementation, such as system configurations, incident response procedures, and user training records that demonstrate controls are not only defined but actively enforced.

That’s where CIS Benchmarks come in. By translating each CIS Critical Security Control into concrete settings for every major operating system, network device, and cloud service, the benchmarks turn abstract best practices into muscle memory.

The moment you apply a CIS profile, you are simultaneously:

• Reducing attacker opportunities by eliminating common vulnerabilities-like outdated patches, misconfigurations, and under-protected edge devices-that are often exploited in early-stage cyberattacks.
• Generating technical evidence such as configuration states and hardening baselines that support frameworks like HIPAA, PCI DSS, and NIST CSF—while recognizing that full audit readiness also requires supporting documentation like policies, training logs, and incident response plans.
• Creating a clear compliance map that helps auditors trace your security controls back to recognized standards, making it easier to demonstrate alignment and maturity.

The financial benefits of CIS compliance are also hard to ignore. The costs, beginning with mandatory notification and extending to regulatory fines, litigation, and customer churn, appear to have a compounding effect that can quickly consume any profits your organization may have previously accrued.

Even with the most diligent security preparations, security issues like misconfigurations can still slip through—and when they do, they often lead to costly breaches.

CIS Benchmarks are designed to reduce the risk of misconfigurations by providing secure configuration guidance for cloud platforms and other systems. While they help address many common issues, not all cloud misconfigurations fall within their scope, especially those related to architecture, identity, or access design.

Just as important is the trust dividend. Customers, insurers, and partners are increasingly incorporating security clauses into contracts—not just to ensure compliance, but to reduce their own exposure to third-party risk.

Implementing CIS-hardened configurations can help demonstrate a commitment to security best practices, but they are just one part of a broader compliance picture. Auditors and insurers typically seek additional evidence of risk mitigation, such as vulnerability management, incident response planning, and user training, to evaluate an organization’s overall security posture.

[Read also: What is risk management? A simplified overview]

Understanding the importance of CIS compliance lays a strong foundation for securing systems and maintaining industry best practices. However, to make informed decisions about your organization’s security framework, it’s essential to understand how CIS compares to other compliance and security standards.

We’ve chosen two highly reputable open-source frameworks: CIS and NIST. CIS offers detailed, step-by-step hardening checklists for specific technologies, and NIST provides a high-level, risk-based framework to help organizations decide which controls they need and why.

You’ll see that when it comes to implementing cybersecurity frameworks, it’s often not an either-or choice. We’ll unpack when and where you blend policy and practice without gaps.

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What is the difference between CIS and NIST?

Think of cybersecurity guidance on a spectrum. On one end sits strategy: principles and policies that help leaders decide what to secure and why. On the other end lives tactics: the step-by-step settings that turn policy into provable defenses. CIS and NIST bookend that scale.

Features	CIS	NIST
Purpose	A prescriptive checklist of Critical Security Controls and benchmarks that harden specific systems out of the box	A risk management framework and catalog of security controls that help you prioritize and govern cybersecurity across the enterprise
Scope	Narrower by design: operating systems, network devices, cloud services, and workloads	Broad and technology-agnostic: from executive risk appetite to supply chain dependencies
Best for	Teams that need quick, measurable wins, especially small and mid-size IT shops running lean security staffs	Mature or regulated organizations building a top-down program (e.g., aligning to NIST CSF 2.0 or SP 800-53 Rev 5)
Granularity	“How to make good happen” with exact configuration values and scripts you can automate today	“What good looks like” at a policy level, leaving control selection and tech settings to you
Relationship	CIS publishes crosswalks to NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 and the Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), ensuring traceability between tactical safeguards and strategic risk management goals	NIST explicitly maps to CIS Controls, so that once you choose a NIST function, you can pull a matching CIS safeguard to implement it

 
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Why the choice is rarely “either-or” when it comes to effective compliance

Most security roadmaps need a mix of the two. One common pattern would be to:

• Begin with NIST to identify and rank risks, establish acceptable residual risk levels, and secure executive buy-in.
• Deploy CIS benchmarks to enforce hardening, satisfy low-level audit evidence, and automate drift detection against those baselines.
• Loop back to NIST for continuous improvement and program maturity scoring.

Healthcare providers, for instance, often conduct NIST CSF assessments to appease regulators, then implement CIS Benchmarks at clinical endpoints, where misconfigurations can become life-or-death issues.

If you need a roadmap and governance model, NIST is your north star. If you need tasks for tomorrow’s change window, CIS is the fastest lift. And when auditors knock, showing that your hardened builds trace cleanly from a CIS safeguard back to a NIST control, you get the best of both worlds: strategy with proof.

[Read also: What is compliance management? Types and improvement tips]

Now comes the fun part: turning big-picture theory into change-tickets, scripts, and lunch-and-learns that actually move your risk needle.

Download the white paper: Operationalizing the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 to learn how to translate high-level NIST guidance of NIST CSF 2.0 into actionable,
measurable outcomes

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How can I implement CIS controls in my organization?

Misconfigurations multiply in the quiet moments between “server provisioned” and “server protected.” CIS controls close that gap before the first port scan even hits–no crystal-ball budgeting exercise required.

Here’s a practical, five-step glide path from “good intentions” to hardened IT infrastructure:

1. Run a reality check. Fast. Scan a representative system, such as Windows Server, a Cisco ASA, or a stray EC2 instance. In minutes, you’ll get a report with red alerts flagging every benchmark fail.
2. Pick your IG and scope. CIS divides the 18 controls into three implementation groups, which can be broadly categorized into two levels of effort:
   • IG1: Essential cyber hygiene that every organization should prioritize first
   • IG2/IG3: Progressively deeper cuts for larger attack surfaces or stricter regulations
3. Harden and automate. Once you’ve identified gaps, standardize secure configurations across your environment. Use CIS Build Kits, Group Policy Objects (GPOs), or configuration management tools like Ansible or Chef to enforce settings at scale. Automate deployment wherever possible to ensure new assets are born compliant and remain hardened over time.

[Read also: Introducing Tanium Automate – Easy-to-create orchestration
and automation at scale]

4. Measure what matters. You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Once controls are in place, track their effectiveness using metrics such as control coverage, incident reduction, and time-to-remediation. Use dashboards or compliance tools to visualize progress across systems and teams. Regular measurement not only validates your efforts but also helps prioritize what to fix next and demonstrates value to stakeholders.
5. Train the humans, because attackers still attack. Technology alone can’t prevent human error—74% of breaches are caused by mistakes, stolen credentials, and social engineering. Layer short, scenario-based training and phishing drills onto every rollout.

Scan, prioritize, automate, measure, and educate—those five components will transform CIS from a PDF on a shared drive into a living control system that measurably improves your level of security and reduces both technical and human risk.

Now that you’ve got the five-step glide path, let’s look at the tools organizations traditionally rely on to support CIS compliance. Understanding these tools—and their limitations—helps highlight why many teams are shifting toward more integrated, real-time approaches that align compliance with broader security operations.

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What types of tools are commonly used to address CIS compliance?

Every security and compliance framework—whether CIS, NIST, PCI DSS, HIPAA, or ISO—starts in the same place: visibility. Before you can assess, harden, remediate, or prove anything, you need to know what’s in your environment. That means having a real-time, accurate inventory of devices and the software running on them. Without this, every other control is built on a shaky foundation.

These categories also represent a maturity curve—from reactive, fragmented efforts to proactive, unified control. Organizations that rely on disconnected tools often find themselves stuck in firefighting mode, while those that consolidate capabilities can move faster, with greater confidence and resilience.

Traditionally, organizations have stitched together a patchwork of point solutions to approximate this journey. These tools generally fall into five categories:

1. Visibility and inventory: Before any assessment or enforcement can begin, organizations need a complete and current view of their environment. Traditional tools for asset discovery and software inventory often operate in silos, rely on periodic scans, or require manual reconciliation across systems. This leads to blind spots, stale data, and inconsistent inventories—especially in hybrid or dynamic environments.
   
   Without real-time visibility into the devices and applications present, organizations are forced into a reactive posture, unable to assess risk or enforce controls with confidence. Visibility isn’t just the first step—it’s the foundation for every other control.
2. Assessment: Tools like the CIS Controls Self Assessment Tool (CSAT) or vulnerability scanners that help organizations evaluate compliance posture and track maturity against the controls by generating dashboards for leadership.
   
   However, these are often standalone tools that don’t integrate with real-time telemetry or enforcement systems, making it challenging to validate findings, detect drift, or trigger remediation workflows.
3. Hardening: Config-as-code tools (e.g., Ansible, Puppet) and cloud-native services (e.g., AWS Config Conformance Packs, Azure Policy Initiatives) enable teams to integrate CIS-aligned settings into their infrastructure.
   
   These tools can be powerful, but they often require deep expertise, are brittle across hybrid environments, and lack continuous validation. Without real-time visibility, it’s hard to know if configurations remain compliant after deployment.
4. Remediation: Once risks or misconfigurations are identified, the next step is to fix them. Traditional remediation approaches often involve manual workflows, ticketing systems, or scripts that require specialized teams to run. These methods are slow, error-prone, and difficult to scale, especially when time is critical.
   
   Some organizations attempt to automate remediation using orchestration tools; however, these are often disconnected from the systems that initially detect the issues. Without tight integration between detection and response, remediation becomes a bottleneck rather than a safeguard.

This is where the shift from reactive to proactive becomes critical. Hardening is about preventing issues before they occur—remediation is about responding when they do. A mature compliance program doesn’t just react to drift or vulnerabilities but anticipates and prevents them through continuous enforcement and real-time visibility.

5. Proof and reporting: Auditors want evidence. CSAT exports, SIEM dashboards, and vulnerability scanner reports can provide it, but reconciling these across tools often means dealing with inconsistent timestamps, asset mismatches, and siloed data. The result? A fragmented compliance story that’s hard to defend under pressure.

The maturity of your compliance program is directly tied to how quickly and accurately you can move through this cycle. The faster and more confidently you can do this, the more resilient your organization becomes.

However, using multiple tools can create a fragmented approach that often introduces operational drag, increases risk, and leaves critical gaps. Without integration between key processes, such as detection, enforcement, and reporting, teams struggle to transition quickly from insight to action, which slows response times and undermines confidence in compliance efforts. And when a zero-day hits, the question isn’t just “Are we vulnerable?”—it’s “How fast can we find and fix it?”

That’s why a unified platform matters. By consolidating these five capabilities into a single, real-time system, unified platforms eliminate the inefficiencies of disconnected tools, empowering teams to act faster and with greater confidence. This shift also enables organizations to move from reactive compliance to proactive security by automating remediation without compromising business operations.

Features	Traditional toolchain	Unified platform
Visibility and inventory	Periodic scans, siloed asset lists, inconsistent inventories	Real-time asset discovery and inventory as the foundation for all security and compliance workflows
Assessment	Manual scans, CSAT exports, static dashboards	Continuous assessment through real-time telemetry, risk prioritization, and contextual awareness
Hardening	Config-as-code, cloud policies, manual enforcement	Automated enforcement and drift correction across hybrid environments
Remediation	Manual workflows, ticketing systems, disconnected orchestration tools	Integrated, real-time remediation workflows tightly coupled with detection rules and policy management
Proof and reporting	Siloed logs, exports from SIEMs and scanners, manual reconciliation	Audit-ready dashboards with unified, real-time data and traceable compliance evidence

 
The limitations of traditional toolchains are clear: they’re fragmented, reactive, and slow to adapt. As compliance requirements become increasingly complex and threats evolve rapidly, organizations require a more integrated and intelligent approach.

This is where Tanium comes in. By unifying visibility, control, and response into a single platform, Tanium enables organizations to streamline compliance, reduce risk, and operate with confidence at speed and scale.

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How Tanium helps with compliance

Tanium Risk & Compliance unifies assessment, enforcement, and reporting into a single platform, eliminating the need to stitch together siloed tools or manually validate compliance.

Our platform continuously evaluates systems against CIS Benchmarks using real-time telemetry, automatically remediates drift, and consolidates audit evidence, including asset inventories, compliance status, and historical changes.

As part of Tanium Autonomous Endpoint Management (AEM), Risk & Compliance works alongside solutions for asset discovery, patch management, configuration enforcement, and threat detection. Together, these capabilities deliver real-time visibility, vulnerability prioritization, and streamlined remediation—closing the loop that traditional point solutions often leave open.

Through continuous monitoring, workflow automation, and deep partner integrations, Tanium empowers organizations to maintain continuous compliance and build a resilient security posture—one that’s ready for audits, threats, and everything in between.

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Tanium AEM empowers organizations to stay ahead of evolving regulatory requirements and emerging threats, while also reducing operational overhead, streamlining compliance workflows, and fostering stronger collaboration among IT, security, and operations teams.

Schedule a free, customized demo today to learn how Tanium helps teams move from reactive checklists to real-time, audit-ready security.