Does your organization have a formal pre-deployment security hardening process for all systems, hardware, software, and services before they enter production?

This question assesses whether your organization follows a systematic approach to secure all technology components before they become operational in your production environment. Proper pre-deployment hardening includes activities such as removing unnecessary services, applying security patches, configuring secure authentication, implementing least privilege access controls, and ensuring secure network configurations.As evidence, you could provide documentation of your pre-deployment security checklist, hardening standards for different system types, screenshots of configuration management tools, or sample security validation reports that must be completed before production deployment approval.