What is the recommended approach for managing host groups over time?

The recommended approach is to minimize the number of groups while still meeting policy and operational requirements. Host groups are central to policy assignment, sensor updates, prevention tuning, containment workflows, and response policies. Excessive or overlapping groups make precedence difficult to reason about and increase the chance that hosts receive unexpected policies. Department-based or IP-only grouping may be useful in specific cases, but they should not be used indiscriminately. CCFA best practice is to design groups around clear policy intent, stable attributes, and operational need. Dynamic groups should be preferred when membership can be defined reliably by attributes such as OS, OU, tags, or host type. A smaller, well-governed group model is easier to audit and maintain.