Today, compliance isn’t just a checkbox for IT organizations—it’s a business driver. Hybrid IT environments, expanding attack surfaces and smarter threats mean a one-time audit won’t suffice.
91% of the companies plan to adopt continuous compliance within five years, and those who already have it say it accelerates business growth (Drata, 2025).
Gartner predicts 70% of enterprises will bake compliance-as-code into DevOps toolchains by 2026, cutting risk and reducing lead times by 15%.
This is where the partnership between the Progress Chef team and the Center for Internet Security (CIS) comes in. With CIS–Chef Premium Content, organizations move beyond static audits, gaining trusted CIS Benchmarks and automated remediation at scale. Compliance stops being just a report and becomes a living guardrail.
This blog explores why audits fall short, how CIS Premium Content in Chef closes the gap and why automation is the bridge from audit to action.
Why Audits Alone Don’t Deliver Security
Audits offer a snapshot of compliance by flagging misconfigurations or policy gaps at any specific moment. But without follow-through, environments drift back into non-compliance: reports pile up, fixes lag and compliance becomes a seasonal checkbox rather than a living process. Between audits, systems drift and the looming threat landscape, these gaps can lead to real risk such as a breach, an outage or a failed audit.
The graph below shows how compliance strategies hold up as companies grow. Manual checks may work for small teams but soon slow everything down. Moving checks into pipelines smooths things out, but problems can still sneak through since they’re caught only after code is written. Composition, like reusable policy blocks, pushes you further, though it eventually plateaus.
The line that keeps climbing is compliance at the point of change. This means checking rules right as code is written or committed. As a result, mistakes are caught before they spread, maintaining compliance steady instead of rising and falling - why this approach continues upward while others drop off.
However, many organizations find themselves stuck after the audit:
Reports pile up without action
Remediation efforts are manual, slow and inconsistent
Systems drift out of compliance quickly
Compliance becomes an annual or quarterly checkbox, rather than an ongoing practice
That gap between knowing and fixing is exactly why organizations need a trusted baseline—proven universal and widely adopted—and that’s what the CIS Benchmarks provide to close it.
CIS Benchmarks: The Gold Standard for Secure Configurations
The CIS Benchmarks are globally recognized, consensus-driven guidelines for securing operating systems, databases and cloud platforms. They are developed through a community process that brings together industry experts, government agencies and academic institutions.
By adopting CIS Benchmarks, organizations can align their systems with trusted, vendor-agnostic best practices. They serve as a foundation for regulatory requirements such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, NIST and ISO standards.
But while the benchmarks provide the “what,” organizations still need the “how.”
That’s where the Chef compliance solution comes in.
Progress Chef + CIS Premium Content: Closing the Loop
The Chef solution takes the CIS Benchmarks from guidance to practice - integrating them directly into day-to-day workflows. It integrates CIS Benchmarks into its platform through CIS–Chef Premium Content. This premium offering provides more than just audit checks; it delivers a closed-loop compliance solution with both assessment and remediation content.
With Chef and CIS Premium Content, organizations can:
Detect - Continuously scan systems against up-to-date CIS Benchmarks.
Remediate - Apply corrective actions using benchmark-aligned remediation code delivered as premium content.
Enforce - Maintain compliance over time through Chef policy-as-code model, aligning your systems to help prevent drift.
This turns CIS Benchmarks into living, enforceable standards rather than static documents.
A Comprehensive Set of CIS Profiles
What makes CIS-Chef Premium Content particularly powerful is its breadth of coverage. We provide audit and remediation content across a wide range of CIS Benchmarks, which helps consistently enforce security across diverse IT estates.
The catalog includes strong support for:
Operating Systems - CIS Benchmarks for Windows, RHEL, Ubuntu, Amazon Linux, SUSE, CentOS, Debian, Oracle Linux and more.
Databases - Secure configuration guidance for PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL.
Cloud Platforms - CIS Benchmarks for AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Alibaba Cloud.
Containers and Kubernetes - Content to enforce security in Kubernetes clusters, Docker containers and container runtimes.
Specialized Workloads - Additional coverage for middleware and other infrastructure components.
This broad set of supported profiles means organizations don’t need fragmented tools for different environments. With Chef Compliance, they can apply a single, consistent framework for CIS-aligned security across their entire IT landscape.
Benefits of CIS - Chef Premium Content
- Authoritative + Up-to-Date Content
CIS Premium Content helps align your audit and remediation rules with the latest benchmarks, reducing the burden on security teams to track updates manually.
- Audit + Remediation Together
Unlike free/open content, CIS Premium Content within Chef provides both scanning profiles and remediation code, giving organizations a complete toolkit to detect and fix misconfigurations.
- Faster Time to Compliance
Automated remediation reduces the gap between detection and correction from weeks to minutes. This accelerates compliance cycles and strengthens security posture.
- Scalability Across Environments
Whether you manage on-premises servers, cloud workloads or containerized environments, CIS Premium Content works seamlessly with the Chef platform to enforce policies consistently.
- Audit-Ready at All Times
Continuous compliance practices help organizations maintain alignment with CIS Benchmarks ahead of audits—reducing last-minute stress.
From First Scan to Continuous Compliance
Here’s how an organization can leverage CIS—Chef Premium Content for end-to-end compliance:
Baseline Audit - Run an initial CIS Benchmark scan using Chef Compliance to gain visibility into system misconfigurations across your environment.
Gap Analysis - Review detailed reports that map non-compliance to specific CIS Benchmark rules.
Automated Remediation - Apply corrective actions with remediation content included in CIS Premium Content, such as enforcing secure password policies or disabling insecure services.
Ongoing Enforcement - Continuously monitor compliance and enforce policies to check that systems don’t drift back out of compliance.
This approach transforms compliance into a proactive, automated process rather than a reactive, manual one. And it’s not just theory; it’s happening in the real world.
Real-World Example
Imagine a financial services company managing thousands of servers across hybrid cloud environments. Using only audits, the company might uncover hundreds of non-compliant systems—requiring weeks of manual remediation by operations teams.
By adopting CIS–Chef Premium Content, the company can:
Run a baseline CIS Benchmark scan across all systems
Automatically remediate issues such as weak encryption settings or insecure SSH configurations
Continuously enforce policies to help prevent future drift
The result: reduced risk exposure, faster compliance cycles and increased confidence during regulatory audits.
What makes this shift even more powerful is not just the technology, but the cultural change it enables.
From Audit to Action: A Cultural Shift
One of the most powerful aspects of CIS Premium Content in Chef is that it shifts compliance from an event-driven task to a continuous practice. Security and operations teams can collaborate more effectively, using shared workflows that balance speed and security.
Instead of scrambling to pass an audit once a year, organizations maintain compliance every day, strengthening their regulatory posture and security resilience.
Conclusion
Auditing against CIS Benchmarks is a foundational step toward building a more secure, compliant environment. But audits alone don’t keep attackers out or auditors satisfied. The real security gains come from closing the loop with remediation and continuous enforcement.
Through the partnership between the Progress Chef team and CIS, organizations gain access to Premium Content that combines authoritative benchmarks with actionable remediation. With coverage spanning operating systems, databases, cloud platforms and containers, CIS–Chef Premium Content provides a single, unified approach to security and compliance.
CIS provides the gold standard for secure configurations, and the Chef platform delivers the automation to enforce them at scale. Together, they enable organizations to confidently move from audit to action. As a result, compliance is no longer just a checkbox, but a sustained security practice.
Ready to move from audit to action?