Connecting cybersecurity to what your organization is trying to achieve.
Cybersecurity is most useful when it helps an organization make better decisions, pursue its goals safely, manage uncertainty, and adapt as conditions change.
The Cyber Enablement Framework (CEF) is a business-led framework and methodology for managing cybersecurity and digital risk. It connects organizational goals, services, obligations, and risk decisions to security outcomes, capabilities, implementation, evidence, and continuous improvement.
CEF is designed to make business-driven cybersecurity understandable and practical without requiring organizations to begin with a highly technical architecture methodology.
Security in service of organizational goals
Cybersecurity programs often contain large numbers of technologies, controls, standards, findings, metrics, projects, and regulatory requirements.
The difficult question is not simply what security controls should we implement?
It is:
What security capabilities and decisions are necessary to support what the organization is trying to accomplish?
CEF begins with organizational context rather than technology. It creates a path from goals and services to security outcomes, decisions, capabilities, controls, evidence, and learning.
The objective is not security activity for its own sake. The objective is the safe and resilient achievement of organizational goals.
What CEF helps organizations do
CEF provides a common way to:
- make security-informed strategic decisions;
- connect security priorities to organizational goals and services;
- make ownership and decision rights explicit;
- maintain traceability from a business need to implementation and evidence;
- integrate security into organizational change;
- operate and improve security capabilities over time;
- make timely decisions during changing or uncertain conditions; and
- communicate security decisions and outcomes across business and technical stakeholders.
These intended outcomes are explicitly defined in the current CEF charter.
One framework. Four complementary tools.
At the center of CEF are four complementary core components:
FORCE
Security-informed strategic decision-making.
AXIS
Traceability from organizational goals to security outcomes, capabilities, implementation, and evidence.
EVOLVE
Secure change and continuous improvement from strategy through operation.
OODA-SEC
Adaptive decision-making during security operations, incidents, and other time-sensitive situations.
Each has a different purpose. Together they connect strategy, architecture, change, operations, evidence, and learning.
Designed to work with existing standards
CEF is not intended to replace established cybersecurity standards and methods.
Organizations may continue to use frameworks and sources such as NIST CSF, ISO/IEC 27001 and 27002, CIS Controls, SABSA, COBIT, FAIR, MITRE ATT&CK, NIST RMF, regulatory requirements, and sector-specific standards.
CEF provides a way to connect those requirements and practices to organizational context and decisions rather than recreating their control catalogs.
What CEF is not
CEF is not another enormous control catalog.
It is not a vendor-selection guide, a promise of perfect security, a universal maturity race, or a replacement for legal, regulatory, safety, risk, or professional judgment.
It is a framework for making security decisions understandable, traceable, actionable, and adaptable.