NIST announces the final public draft Special Publication 800-37, Revision 2, Risk Management Framework for Information Systems and Organizations--A System Life Cycle Approach for Security and Privacy. 

There are seven major objectives for this update:

• To provide closer linkage and communication between the risk management processes and activities at the C-suite or governance level of the organization and the individuals, processes, and activities at the system and operational level of the organization;
• To institutionalize critical risk management preparatory activities at all risk management levels to facilitate a more effective, efficient, and cost-effective execution of the RMF;
• To demonstrate how the NIST Cybersecurity Framework can be aligned with the RMF and implemented using established NIST risk management processes;
• To integrate privacy risk management processes into the RMF to better support the privacy protection needs for which privacy programs are responsible;
• To promote the development of trustworthy secure software and systems by aligning life cycle-based systems engineering processes in NIST Special Publication 800-160, Volume 1, with the relevant tasks in the RMF;
• To integrate security-related, supply chain risk management (SCRM) concepts into the RMF to address untrustworthy suppliers, insertion of counterfeits, tampering, unauthorized production, theft, insertion of malicious code, and poor manufacturing and development practices throughout the SDLC; and
• To allow for an organization-generated control selection approach to complement the traditional baseline control selection approach and support the use of the consolidated control catalog in NIST Special Publication 800-53, Revision 5.

The addition of the Prepare step is one of the key changes to the RMF—incorporated to achieve more effective, efficient, and cost-effective security and privacy risk management processes.

In addition to seeking your comments on this final public draft, we are specifically seeking feedback on a new RMF Task P-13, Information Life Cycle. The life cycle describes the stages through which information passes, typically characterized as creation or collection, processing, dissemination, use, storage, and disposition, to include destruction and deletion. Identifying and understanding all stages of the information life cycle have significant implications for security and privacy. We are seeking comment on how organizations would executive this task and how we might provide the most helpful discussion to assist organizations in the execution.  

The public comment period for the draft publication is October 2 through October 31. Please submit comments using the available comment template to sec-cert@nist.gov.