A security controls assessment sounds like a big, intimidating project, but it’s really just a structured way to check whether your defenses are working as intended. This guide breaks it down step by step.
What Exactly Are Security Controls Anyway?
Before you can assess your security controls, you need to know what they are.
Security controls are the measures an organization puts in place to protect its systems, data, and networks. The table below shows four common types of security controls with examples.
| Technical Controls | Administrative Controls |
| Examples: – Firewalls – Multi-factor authentication (MFA) – Intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS) – Endpoint detection and response (EDR) – Data encryption | Examples: – Acceptable use policies – Security awareness training – Incident response plans – Access control policies – Third-party vendor risk management |
| Physical Controls | Operational Controls |
| Examples: – Keycard or biometric access to facilities – CCTV surveillance – Locked server rooms – Environmental controls (fire suppression, cooling) – Clean desk policies | Examples: – Log management and monitoring – Change management processes – Backup and recovery procedures – User access reviews and recertification – Penetration testing programs |
How to Perform a Security Controls Assessment (SCA)
Here’s a general walkthrough you can follow when conducting a security controls assessment. The depth and formality of each step will vary depending on your organization’s size, industry, and compliance obligations.
Step 1: Define the Scope
Start by deciding what you’re assessing. Are you looking at your entire IT environment or just a specific system, such as cloud infrastructure or a payment processing platform? An unclear scope can easily turn a useful assessment into an endless project.
One approach is to first inventory your most valuable information assets.
- Which systems are critical for your business?
- What data carries the most risk if it’s exposed or compromised?
Knowing the answers helps you identify the regulatory requirements that apply and enables you to set realistic timelines and allocate resources.
Step 2: Assign Roles and Responsibilities
An SCA doesn’t run itself. Before any testing begins, you need clear ownership. In smaller organizations, this often falls to whoever manages security. In larger organizations, it might involve a dedicated team plus contributors from IT, compliance, and business units.
Map out who is responsible for each part of the process, including any contractors or consultants. The NIST SP 800-53A framework also draws a distinction worth noting here — assessments can be performed by someone internal (self) or by an independent party (independent). For systems with a moderate or high risk classification, an independent assessment is typically required at least once during the accreditation period.
Step 3: Select a Control Framework
You need a baseline to measure against. Pick a control framework that fits your industry and compliance needs. Common choices include:
- NIST SP 800-53 for federal systems and organizations that work with U.S. government data
- ISO/IEC 27001 for internationally recognized information security management
- CIS Controls for a more practical and prioritized approach to cyber defense
The framework you choose will give you the list of controls you need to evaluate.
Step 4: Select Your Assessment Tools
Next, decide which tools you’ll use to run the assessment. Some organizations rely on manual processes, interviews, and documentation reviews. Others use automated platforms that simulate attacks, scan for vulnerabilities, and track findings across systems. Many use both.
If you’re assessing technical controls, configuration auditing software, vulnerability scanners, and other offensive security tools will cover a lot of ground. For SaaS environments specifically, a dedicated SaaS security posture management system is worth considering, since ordinary scanners can’t identify misconfigurations inside SaaS applications.
The goal is to match your tooling to the environment you’re assessing.
Step 5: Gather Information About the Controls
Before you start testing, collect the documentation that describes each control you plan to assess. That includes each control’s objective and activity:
- Objective: What do you aim to accomplish by implementing the security control?
- Activity: How does the control actually work?
These details can be found in policy documents and system security plans, although some of them won’t be written down anywhere, and you’ll need to track them down.
Knowing the objective of a control before you test it is what makes the test meaningful. If you don’t know what a control is supposed to do, you can’t tell whether it’s working correctly.
Step 6: Test the Controls and Assess Vulnerabilities
Now comes the actual assessment. For each control in scope, use a combination of the following assessment methods:
- Interviews involve talking to the people who manage or use the controls. Ask them how processes work, who has access to what, and what happens when something breaks.
- Observation means watching processes in action. You might sit with an IT administrator while they provision a new user account to verify the access request process is being followed.
- Inspection is a review of logs, reports, and configurations. Pull firewall rule sets, check patch deployment reports, and review user access reviews.
- Technical testing goes deeper and may include vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, or configuration audits.
Mark each control as Satisfied, Partially Satisfied, or Not Satisfied based on what you find. That’s the terminology NIST uses in its assessment framework, and it maps directly into how you’ll prioritize remediation.
Step 7: Document and Report Findings
Put together a report that summarizes what you found, which controls are working, and where the gaps are. Good assessment reports include the following:
- Executive summary
- Scope and methodology
- Control-by-control findings
- Risk ratings for each gap
This step also means updating your controls documentation. If you discover that a control activity relies on an integration that’s no longer supported, that needs to be recorded and flagged for replacement, not just noted in the report.
It’s also important to keep the language clear because decision-makers need to understand the findings well enough to approve budgets and prioritize fixes.
Step 8: Build a Plan of Action and Remediate
An assessment is only as useful as what you do with the results. Controls that come back as Partially Satisfied or Not Satisfied should feed directly into a Plan of Action and Milestones (POA&M), a formal document that tracks each identified gap alongside the planned fix, the person responsible, and the target completion date. The NIST framework treats the POA&M as a required output of the assessment process.
Some fixes, like applying a missing patch, can happen in days. Others, like rolling out a new identity and access management (IAM) system, may require a full project plan. Either way, tracking everything in one place helps keep remediation efforts on schedule.
Schedule a follow-up review to verify that fixes were completed and that the controls are now working as intended. Many organizations run assessments annually or after major changes to their environment.
Why Is a Security Controls Assessment Important?
Running a security controls assessment takes time and effort, but it’s worth it because it helps organizations:
- Find problems before attackers do: Assessments give you a chance to catch weak or broken controls while the situation is still calm, not while you’re managing an active breach.
- Reduce compliance risk: Regulatory frameworks such as HIPAA and PCI DSS don’t just require organizations to implement security controls, but also verify that they work. A documented assessment provides the evidence auditors need.
- Make better resource decisions: When leadership understands where the gaps are, they can prioritize security spending. Instead of investing in new tools you might not need, you can improve the controls already in place.
- Reduce your attack surface: An assessment forces you to look at every entry point, permission, and process that a threat actor could potentially exploit. When you find controls that are missing or misconfigured, fixing them directly reduces your attack surface.
- Improve security culture: Going through the assessment process raises awareness across the teams involved. When people understand why controls exist and how they’re evaluated, they’re more likely to follow them.
Conclusion
A security controls assessment isn’t a one-time task. It’s a continuous cycle because your environment changes, new threats emerge, and frameworks get updated.
The organizations that treat security controls assessment as a regular practice, rather than a last-minute response before an audit, are the ones that build real security resilience over time.
