STIG Hardening by Design

STIG Hardening by Design

As of 2025, nearly 500 DISA STIGs apply across operating systems, platforms and application components, and each 90-day update resets a manual hardening cycle that often takes weeks or months. This architecture insight describes STIG enforcement built into the operating system: pre-hardened base images, locked configuration policies, runtime controls against drift and automated remediation. In the CleanStart workflow, CI/CD verifies STIG settings, OpenSCAP validation runs automatically and a compliance attestation is generated, with support for FedRAMP ConMon, NIST SP 800-53 and SCAP 1.3.