The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a division of the Department of Commerce is a few years away from its 125th birthday. At the time of NIST’s founding, the United States of America was falling behind its European rivals, in terms of the development of standards, technology, and measurements, to promote and forward inventions and innovation. NIST has served its mission and continues to do so by “promoting U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life”. The United States has benefited from what NIST refers to as its three main competencies: “Measurement Science, Rigorous Traceability, and the Development and Use of Standards.” Through these competencies, NIST has played an integral part in thousands of technical innovations in the last century.
Ten years ago, NIST was given the responsibility, by Executive Order 13636, to establish requirements for a cybersecurity framework, to address the issues facing federal infrastructure security due to the increase in cybersecurity breaches. In response to this Executive Order, NIST published multiple cybersecurity Special publications along with related industry-specific Special Publications to detail how these cybersecurity standards address a particular industrial sector and relate to that industry.
With the issuance of the Special Publication “800 series”, which was set up to define cybersecurity standards, frameworks, risk assessments, and security controls, federal entities are given guidance on required security controls for IT systems.
NIST’s Special Publication 800-53 is one of the most widely used benchmarks of computing systems used as a catalog to tailor the security and privacy controls of a system. NIST SP 800-53 was initially released in February 2005 and provides security control standards for federal agencies to align with as part of its objective to reduce federal system risk by providing consistent cybersecurity standards. NIST 800-53 serves as a catalog of security controls recommended for federal information systems. Cybersecurity standards, now at the forefront due to the increasing nature of cyber-attacks, are not new to NIST.
NIST is an acronym for the National Institute of Standards and Technology and is part of the United States Department of Commerce. NIST provides a wide variety of standards and guidelines that cover a lot of different topics for companies to follow to better further their process. NIST focuses on perseverance, integrity, inclusivity, and excellence as their core values when performing their work to make sure that everything is done correctly throughout the entire company. They focus on science, standards, and technology to improve the world around them in many different ways that will be beneficial to all that are involved with these industries.
