The important part about a framework is that it gives an outline of something to follow. If you are managing some computers, you may miss a security hole because you didn’t think about it. You can use parts of a framework as a checklist to see should be done that hasn’t been done yet. There are different ways to use a framework but there are five core parts that are needed. If you don’t have one of those parts it could be a major issue. It is identify, Protect, detect, respond, and recover. The first part is you need to identify what you have that needs protecting. Do you have a lot of important data like health records or trade secrets? How many systems are on the network? Next is you need to protect what you have. Make safeguards that try to keep bad things from happening. If the area has a decent chance of flooding them, you might want to put the computers on the second floor. Make sure all the software is up to date so a know virus won’t work. You also need a good way to detect when bad things do happen. Is a large amount of data being downloaded somewhere that isn’t normal? There is a good change someone is trying to steel the data. When you detect something then you need to respond. Stopping it before any damage is done is ideal but that may not be possible. Damage control by keeping it from getting any worse would be great. No matter how much damage is done you will need to recover from it. Have a plan to get back to normal operations. Did you lose data in some way? Restore the data from offsite backups. Getting back to normal quickly is very important.