A security program that is not explicitly connected to the goals established in the security strategy is a program that operates without direction. One of the most important governance disciplines in security program execution is ensuring that the strategic objectives defined during the strategy phase, expressed as commitments to optimise, reduce, increase, understand, and educate across the full scope of the security domain, are carried forward into the operational disciplines of incident response and security operations with the same clarity and accountability that governed their original definition.
The NIST Cybersecurity Framework’s five functional domains of Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover provide the most widely adopted structural model for this linkage, and the security program should use this model as the organising framework through which strategy goals are translated into specific, measurable incident response objectives. Each domain carries its own set of metrics, tasks, and improvement objectives that together define what the program must deliver and how its performance will be assessed and reported.
Identification #
The identification domain establishes the foundational knowledge on which every other security function depends. Without an accurate and continuously maintained understanding of the organisation’s technical assets, business processes, supplier relationships, and associated risks, the program cannot make informed decisions about where to direct its protective, detective, and responsive capabilities. Identification is therefore not a preliminary activity that precedes the security program’s operational work. It is an ongoing discipline whose quality determines the effectiveness of everything that follows.
The security program’s identification objectives should reflect a commitment to understanding the full scope of the environment being protected and to progressively improving the quality and currency of that understanding over time. Specific metrics and objectives within this domain include:
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