ANSSI recommendations: the essential cyber hygiene guide for SMEs

ANSSI, the French national cybersecurity agency, is the reference authority for cybersecurity in France. Its cyber hygiene guide lists a set of simple, non exhaustive measures that rule out most of the common incident scenarios observed in companies.

Why rely on ANSSI recommendations

These recommendations are not obtained like a certification: they are implemented, and nothing formally attests that they are. That is both their strength and their limit. They are free, public and designed for organizations of any size, including the smallest structures without internal technical expertise, but they carry no label that can be shown to a client, an insurer or a partner, unlike an ISO 27001 certification.

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The priority measures to put in place

Theme	Recommended measure
Authentication	Strong passwords and multi factor authentication on sensitive accounts
Updates	Systematic application of security patches, on both workstations and servers
Backups	Regular, tested backups, isolated from the main network
Accounts and access	Separation of administrator accounts from standard user accounts
Network	Network segmentation and filtering of inbound and outbound traffic
Awareness	Employee training on phishing and social engineering risks

A progressive rather than exhaustive rollout

Identify the measures already in place, without judgment.
Prioritize the measures whose absence exposes the organization to the highest risk (authentication, backups).
Plan the rollout of missing measures over several months rather than aiming for immediate completeness.
Document the measures applied, so they can be demonstrated when needed (cyber insurance, tenders, audits).

Common mistakes

Assuming cybersecurity is reserved for large companies.
Deploying tools without reviewing practices: an antivirus does not replace a backup policy.
Training teams only once, with no regular refresher.

Checking, measure by measure, which of these recommendations are already applied and which ones remain to be prioritized produces a far more useful roadmap than a list of good intentions nobody has verified.