CIS Controls v8 17.3 — Establish and Maintain an Enterprise Process for Reporting Incidents

What this control requires

Establish and maintain an enterprise process for the workforce to report security incidents. The process includes reporting timeframe, personnel to report to, mechanism for reporting, and the minimum information to be reported. Ensure the process is publicly available to all of the workforce. Review annually, or when significant enterprise changes occur that could impact this Safeguard.

In plain English

Establish and maintain an enterprise process for the workforce to report security incidents. In practice, this means you can prove you establish and maintain enterprise-level controls on a defined cadence.

Why it matters

The CIS Controls are an industry-vetted, prioritised defence: skipping a safeguard widens the attack surface that the safeguards above and below it assume is closed. Audit frameworks (FedRAMP, PCI DSS, HIPAA) all cite CIS as evidence of due care.

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 CIS-aligned reviewer wants to see (a) which Implementation Group you are targeting, (b) a documented owner for the safeguard, and (c) a tooling or process artefact (config, scan output, ticket) that proves the safeguard runs on the cadence the control demands.

Within Respond, the assessor will trace your implementation back to the catalogue reference (Control 17.3) and look for objective evidence on the latest two assessment cycles.

How to implement

Policy Management

Docs. Keep each policy in version-controlled Markdown alongside the code that implements it; ship a signed PDF snapshot at each annual review and link the SHA into the SoA.

Operational checklist

• Establish And Maintain. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Ensure. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Scope: enterprise.

Evidence to collect

• Policy Document. A signed and version-controlled policy / standard / procedure document.
• Infra Scan. Continuous infrastructure-posture telemetry — AWS Config, Azure Policy compliance, GCP Organisation Policy, Wiz / Prisma findings.

Signed policy or standard documents the safeguard. Focus: Establish and Maintain an Enterprise Process for Reporting Incidents.

Common pitfalls

• Policies that no engineer has read; the version in Confluence drifts from the version that's actually being enforced.

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.

• ISO/IEC 27001:2022 A.5.5 — Contact with authorities
• SOC 2 (2017 TSC) CC2.3 — External Communication on Internal Control Matters
• GDPR Article 83 — General conditions for imposing administrative fines
• ISO/IEC 27701:2025 A.3.15 — Independent review
• ISO/IEC 42001:2023 A.2.2 — Policies for the responsible development or use of AI systems

Related controls in CIS Controls v8

• Control 2.3 — Address Unauthorized Software
• Control 1.2 — Address Unauthorized Assets
• Control 7.2 — Establish and Maintain a Remediation Process
• Control 7.5 — Perform Automated Vulnerability Scans of Internal Enterprise Assets
• Control 7.6 — Perform Automated Vulnerability Scans of Externally-Exposed Enterprise Assets
• Control 17.4 — Establish and Maintain an Incident Response Process

References

• Center for Internet Security — CIS Controls v8
• Catalogue identifier: Control 17.3

Topics: governance riskpolicy management