Security Best Practices

Use Security Best Practices to implement privacy and security configuration tasks on your ServiceNow instance.

Identify best practices to improve your security posture, and follow step-by-step instructions on how to implement them. Security Best Practices provide the following:

• The home page shows an overview of your progress on implementing security best practices. You can also organize and manage lists of security best practices according to your organization's goals.
• The overview page provides details of each security best practice, the steps to implement them, and a record of all activities and comments.
• The task steps page provides you with instructions on how to implement security best practices.
• The activity page tracks the history of the user and system actions related to your security best practices.

Security Best Practices home page

The home page displays a Manage your best practices section, which includes graphs provide an overview of your progress.

Completed overall

Displays a count and trend line of best practices you have completed. Select the card to view the Completed Overall metric page in Security metrics.

Completed by maturity level

Displays a chart of completed best practices organized by maturity level (see a description of maturity levels in the proceeding table). Select the card to view the Completed by Maturity Level metric page in Security metrics.

Build a foundation

Select the Build a foundation button to filter the table on this page to display only best practices in the Build a foundation maturity level. These are lower impact changes you can make to start improving instance security.

Create a task

Use the +Create task button to create a Security Task to track or delegate best practice work. For details on Security Tasks, see Security Tasks.

The table enables you to apply filters so that you can sort and save filtered lists, which you can use as work lists for different use cases or roles. See save a filtered list for more information.

The following are explanations of the fields related to the security best practices table.

Table 1. Summary of fields used in the security best practices table

Name	Description
Name	Word used to identify a security best practice.
Maturity level	Applications and features that have been arranged by the order of impact to provide you measurable results. The values for maturity levels are: Build a foundation Enhance the experience Optimize the functionality Add advanced features These can also be thought of as crawl, walk, run, and fly phases.
Status	Current state of a best practice: Open In progress Completed
Priority	Order of importance for implementing a best practice in your organization: Immediate Later Not applicable
Goals	Security category that a best practice addresses: Address initial security configurations Secure emails Monitoring logs Manage access controls Protect with encryption Keep instances up to date
First introduced	Which Security Center version the best practice was introduced.
Changed	Which Security Center version the best practice was changed.
Removed	Which Security Center version the best practice was removed.

Security Best Practices details page

Select a best practice from the table to view its page. At the top of the details page, you can view general information about the security best practice including priority, maturity level, and status. Use Complete Best Practice button to mark a the practice as complete, or Reopen Best Practice button to mark the practice complete. Use the +Create Task to create a Security Task to track and delegate this task. For details on Security Tasks, see Security Tasks.

This page provides more information on the best practice, divided into tabs:

Overview

This tab contains the Priority drop-down menu, which enables you to specify the security best practices that are important to you at this time and which are not applicable.

The details section provides content about the features associated with the security best practice, and the documentation section provides one or more links where you can find additional information.

The Progress card on the right shows the number of steps completed versus the total number of steps included. Select go to next step to navigate to the next incomplete step.

The best practice update history card provides a snapshot of the release information for the best practice. You can track which ServiceNow Security Center version the security best practice was released in, and which versions it was subsequently last updated in.

Task Steps

This tab provides step-by-step instructions for how to implement this security best practice. See complete a security best practice for more information.

Activity

This tabe displays timestamped activities listed from newest to oldest. Use search and filter to query for information. See apply filters to the security best practices table for more information.

• Complete a security best practice
  Learn how to complete a security best practice on your ServiceNow instance.
• View activity of a best practice
  Track the chronological and timestamped history related to a security best practice that you're completing on your ServiceNow instance, along with the user that initiated the activity.
• View data of completed best practices
  See visual representations of the total amount of best practices completed, or segmented by maturity level.
• Filters the security best practices table
  Apply filters to return more relevant results for your security best practices.
• Best Practices
  Learn details about the Best Practices in the Security Posture Console.