The Essential Eight is the Australian Cyber Security Centre’s baseline set of mitigation strategies: application control, patching applications and operating systems, macro settings, hardening, admin privilege restriction, multi-factor authentication and regular backups, each measured against maturity levels.
Australian organisations, especially those near government, are increasingly asked for their Essential Eight maturity in procurement. For workplace software buyers the practical questions map neatly: does the vendor patch promptly, enforce MFA, restrict admin access and keep tested backups.