Why the essential 8?

These strategies are designed to work together. Individually they are all powerful tools to protect individual components and operations of your network. Together they represent a multi-level approach that provides comprehensive protection, even if adversaries do manage to break one of the defensive measures.

None of these strategies is ‘state-of-the-art’ nor bleeding edge. They are all tried and true. There is virtually no risk in adopting these strategies if implemented correctly. Indeed, performing back-ups for important data has been an essential rule for IT managers since day one. The real benefit of the ASD Essential 8 is that they provide a baseline cyber security posture and provide a quantifiable benchmark to meet ASD recommendations.

The essential eight strategies can go a long way into protecting your agencies from security breaches and potentially damaging malware for a comparatively modest financial investment. While implementing these strategies will entail an investment of staff time and possible hardware/software upgrades, the costs involved will be considerably lower than cleaning up in the wake of a compromise.

Whilst your agency can implement these mitigation strategies in an ad hoc manner, basing your security posture on a single comprehensive framework has many benefits. With a comprehensive security fabric, you would be able to manage most of the strategies – such as whitelisting, patching, admin privileges – from a centralised console. Additionally, you’ll be able to apply consistent and appropriate enforcement of policy across all users, applications and devices whether on premise, remote, cloud or hybrid cloud.

Many of these mitigation strategies can be automated to reduce management overheads whilst ensuring compliance. Most security solutions can be set up with thresholds and alerts to monitor network traffic so that any anomalous activity can be quickly identified and investigated. Massive unauthorised downloads, such as the Panama Papers leak, wouldn’t have happened with the right mitigation strategies in place.