Which practice ensures that information systems maintain secure settings and minimize drift?

Which practice ensures that information systems maintain secure settings and minimize drift?

• A. Patch management
• B. Incident response
• C. Disaster recovery
• D. Secure configuration management

Answer: (D)

Maintaining secure settings and minimizing drift is achieved through secure configuration management. This practice sets and enforces secure baselines for systems, continuously inventories configurations, and automates or coordinates changes so that any deviation from approved, hardened states is quickly detected and corrected. By keeping configurations aligned with security policies and standards, it reduces the risk introduced by misconfigurations and ensures systems stay in a known, trusted state over time. Patch management, incident response, and disaster recovery address other aspects of security and resilience: patch management focuses on applying updates to fix vulnerabilities, incident response handles detected threats, and disaster recovery deals with restoring operations after a disruptive event. None of these ensure ongoing alignment of system settings with approved security baselines the way secure configuration management does.

Maintaining secure settings and minimizing drift is achieved through secure configuration management. This practice sets and enforces secure baselines for systems, continuously inventories configurations, and automates or coordinates changes so that any deviation from approved, hardened states is quickly detected and corrected. By keeping configurations aligned with security policies and standards, it reduces the risk introduced by misconfigurations and ensures systems stay in a known, trusted state over time.

Patch management, incident response, and disaster recovery address other aspects of security and resilience: patch management focuses on applying updates to fix vulnerabilities, incident response handles detected threats, and disaster recovery deals with restoring operations after a disruptive event. None of these ensure ongoing alignment of system settings with approved security baselines the way secure configuration management does.