NIST CSF is a voluntary framework designed to help organisations, regardless of size or industry, develop and implement comprehensive cybersecurity protocols and practices. It is intended to help organisations audit their existing cybersecurity practices, identify potential oversights and weak points, and build procedures and policies that enable agile threat detection and response procedures.
CSF is organised into five key functions: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover. These functions are designed to include a set of outcomes that organisations can use to assess and improve their existing cybersecurity posture.
Because CSF is not geared towards any one industry or entity size, it is designed to be flexible and scalable. Therefore, while it provides a solid framework on which organisations can build their cybersecurity management programs, it lacks the comprehensive aspects of other standards.