Guard-railed security benchmark compliance assurance includes storing in memory of a computer a multiplicity of specific parameter values, retrieving from memory, different parameterized operating system directives arranged together in a programmatic module, populating different parameters of the directives with respective ones of the stored specific parameter values and invoking each of the directives with the populated different parameters through a command line shell of an operating system executing in the computer, each invocation establishing a different configuration setting in a computing environment hosted by the computer.