Friday, October 10, 2025
Implementing CIS™ Benchmarks: What if you stopped complicating your life?
Communication et CollaborationCulture et MéthodologieDevopsMonitoring
You know the drill: your management wants compliance, the auditors are knocking at the door, and between you and your teams, implementing CIS™ benchmarks feels more like an obstacle course than simple compliance.
300 to 500 checkpoints per benchmark. Thousands of machines to process. Exceptions everywhere. And always the same question: where to start without breaking everything?
If you recognize yourself in this description, you're not alone. Most operations teams experience compliance as an additional constraint on top of their daily operational maintenance. The result? Endless meetings to justify deviations, avalanches of tickets, and above all... very little time devoted to truly strengthening security.
Yet there is another approach
What if implementing CIS™ benchmarks could be done differently? Without stress, and most importantly, without jeopardizing your production?
The good news is that it's possible. You just need to adopt the right methodology and follow a few key principles. There's no magic formula, just common sense and method.
This article, proposed by Rudder, details 5 essential principles for implementing your CIS™ benchmarks in a progressive, controlled manner, adapted to your field realities:
- How to segment your environments to avoid applying the same rules to machines with radically different uses
- Why audit mode is your best ally before any modification
- The art of moving forward through iteration to never lose control
- The crucial importance of documenting your choices (and how it will save your ass during the next audit)
- How to manage exceptions without making your teams feel guilty
RudderRUDDER , Platinum sponsor of DEVOPS REX , will also be launching its new solution in a few weeks: Policy and benchmark compliance, specially designed to deploy CIS™ benchmarks in an iterative, flexible and granular manner. A solution designed to adapt to your methodology, not the other way around.
