Security hardening with benchmarks such as CIS, STIGs, and NIST

Benchmarks provide a great way for anyone to gain assurance of their individual security efforts. Created by security experts globally or led by security mature government departments such as NIST, benchmarks cover a whole range of systems, configurations, software, and more.

Hardening for security mostly boils down to do the following: 

1. Agreeing on what is the minimal set of configuration that qualifies as secure configuration. This is usually defined as a hardening benchmark or framework.
2. Making changes to all the aspects of the system that are touched by such configuration.
3. Measuring periodically if the application and system are still in line with the configuration or if there is any deviation.
4. If any deviation is found, take corrective action to fix that. 
5. If no deviation is found, log that.
6. Since software is always getting upgraded, staying on top of the latest configuration guidelines and benchmarks is most important.

The three...