One of the things that I love about the Red Hat folk is that they totally get this whole security thing. Yeah, we can lock down other distros and make them more secure, as we've already seen. But with Red Hat distros, it's a bit easier. For a lot of things, the maintainers of the Red Hat-type distros have set secure default options that aren't securely set by default on other distros. (For example, Red Hat distros are the only ones that come with users' home directories locked down by default.) For other things, the Red Hat-type distros come with tools and installation options that help make life easier for a busy, security-conscious administrator.

When you install a Red Hat-type distro, you'll be given the chance to apply an OpenSCAP profile during the operating system installation. Here, on this CentOS 7 installer screen, you'll see the option to choose a security profile in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen:

All you have to do is click on that and then choose your profile:

At the time of writing, in January 2020, this won't work for either CentOS 8.0 or CentOS 8.1. Since there are no centos8 profiles yet, this screen won't show you any choices. You can see what I mean by looking at the following screenshot:

Yes, there's nothing there. (I had hoped that this would get fixed in the CentOS 8.1 release, but no such luck.) But, for RHEL 8, you have two choices:

Okay, that pretty much wraps it up for our discussion of OpenSCAP. The only thing left to add is that, as great as OpenSCAP is, it won't do everything. For example, some security standards require that you have certain directories, such as /home/ or /var/, on their own separate partitions. An OpenSCAP scan will alert you if that's not the case, but it can't change your existing partitioning scheme. So, for things like that, you'll need to get a checklist from the governing body that dictates your security requirements and do a bit of advanced work before you even touch OpenSCAP.