BSI C5:2020 AM-04 — Decommissioning of Hardware

What this control requires

Requires approval for hardware decommissioning, ensuring complete and permanent data deletion or media destruction per policies. Prevents residual data exposure, protecting cloud customer data confidentiality during the disposal of system components.

In plain English

Requires approval for hardware decommissioning, ensuring complete and permanent data deletion or media destruction per policies. In practice, this means you can prove you risk hardware-level controls on a defined cadence.

Why it matters

BSI C5 is the default cloud-security baseline German public-sector buyers and many DAX-listed enterprises expect; gaps here directly block procurement in the DACH region and frequently appear as must-have items in EU public-tender documents.

This control is rated critical in the source catalogue. Treat gaps here as production incidents in the risk register, not housekeeping.

What an auditor looks for

A C5 attesting auditor (under ISAE 3000 / IDW PS 860) tests both the design and — for a Type 2 — the operating effectiveness over the attestation period. For each criterion they look for both the Basic and any in-scope Additional objectives.

Within Asset Management, the assessor will trace your implementation back to the catalogue reference (Criterion AM-04) and look for objective evidence on the latest two assessment cycles.

How to implement

Incident Response

Runbook. Maintain a runbook keyed by incident type with named roles (IC, comms, scribe), an out-of-band comms channel, and a 72-hour timeline for external notification.

Tabletop. Run a quarterly tabletop exercise (ransomware, insider, supply-chain) and feed gaps back into the runbook.

Cloud Posture

CSPM. Run Wiz / Prisma / Defender for Cloud / Security Command Center over every account; auto-ticket findings above your accepted-risk threshold.

Operational checklist

• Risk. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Confidentiality. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Asset. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Data. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Scope: hardware, cloud customer data, management.

Evidence to collect

• Ticketing Workflow. ticketing_workflow evidence
• Infra Scan. Continuous infrastructure-posture telemetry — AWS Config, Azure Policy compliance, GCP Organisation Policy, Wiz / Prisma findings.

Workflow metrics (ServiceNow, Jira) show approvals and remediation. Focus: Decommissioning of Hardware.

Common pitfalls

• Runbooks that name a role but no person, or list a paging channel that no longer exists.
• Treating CSPM findings as a backlog instead of a hot queue: findings older than the policy SLA accumulate until the auditor asks why.

How it maps to other frameworks

Computed from shared tags, control component and key-operation subjects — handy when you are reconciling controls across an audit.

• CIS Controls v8 11.2 — Perform Automated Backups
• ISO/IEC 27001:2022 A.5.8 — Information security in project management
• GDPR Article 49 — Derogations for specific situations

Related controls in BSI C5:2020

• Criterion DEV-03 — Policies for changes to information systems
• Criterion AM-06 — Asset Classification and Labelling
• Criterion OPS-20 — Managing Vulnerabilities, Malfunctions and Errors - Measurements, Analyses and Assessments of Procedures
• Criterion DEV-09 — Approvals for provision in the production environment
• Criterion AM-01 — Asset Inventory
• Criterion AM-03 — Commissioning of Hardware

References

• Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI) — BSI C5:2020
• Catalogue identifier: Criterion AM-04

Topics: governance riskchange managementincident responsecloud posture