BSI C5:2020 DEV-09 — Approvals for provision in the production environment

What this control requires

Requires authorized approvals for production environment changes based on test results and criteria, involving customers per agreements. Ensures secure deployments, protecting cloud customer data from unverified or risky updates.

In plain English

Requires authorized approvals for production environment changes based on test results and criteria, involving customers per agreements. In practice, this means you can prove you risk agreements-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 high. Auditors expect a named owner, a remediation SLA, and a tooling artefact that evidences continuous operation.

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 Development & Change Management, the assessor will trace your implementation back to the catalogue reference (Criterion DEV-09) 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.

Code Review Testing

Pipeline. Require at least one human reviewer plus passing CI (lint, type, unit, security scan) before merge — protected branches enforce this.

Operational checklist

• Risk. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Review. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Data. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Test. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Secure. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Scope: agreements, cloud customer data, development, changes, management.

Evidence to collect

• Ticketing Workflow. ticketing_workflow evidence

Workflow metrics (ServiceNow, Jira) show approvals and remediation. Focus: Approvals for provision in the production environment.

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 11.5 — Test Data Recovery
• ISO/IEC 27001:2022 A.5.8 — Information security in project management

Related controls in BSI C5:2020

• Criterion DEV-03 — Policies for changes to information systems
• Criterion DEV-06 — Testing changes
• Criterion AM-04 — Decommissioning of Hardware
• Criterion DEV-10 — Separation of environments
• Criterion DEV-04 — Safety training and awareness programme regarding continuous software delivery and associated systems, components or tools.
• Criterion OPS-19 — Managing Vulnerabilities, Malfunctions and Errors - Penetration Tests

References

• Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI) — BSI C5:2020
• Catalogue identifier: Criterion DEV-09

Topics: governance riskchange managementincident responsecloud posturecode review testing