The Australian Signals Directorate used an ACSC news item of 15 October to launch ASD Essentials, an evolution of the widely adopted Essential Eight into a series of focused chapters supporting a broader range of technology environments. The first three chapters are Essentials for enterprise IT — an evolution of the Essential Eight — Essentials for operational technology, supporting critical-infrastructure operators protecting OT environments, and Essentials for cloud, for organisations whose environment is delivered entirely through SaaS and PaaS. ASD frames the change as giving Commonwealth entities, critical-infrastructure owners and large organisations practical, threat-informed and prioritised measures to protect critical business functions and systems. For Australian organisations this is the substantive guidance event of the week and the successor roadmap to a framework embedded in APRA and ACSC expectations; the OT chapter lands in the same week ACSC repeated its advice on protecting operational technology and edge devices, and the cloud chapter targets estates that have moved past the on-premises assumptions of the original eight.

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