CIS Controls v8 17.4 — Establish and Maintain an Incident Response Process

What this control requires

Establish and maintain an incident response process that addresses roles and responsibilities, compliance requirements, and a communication plan. Review annually, or when significant enterprise changes occur that could impact this Safeguard.

In plain English

Establish and maintain an incident response process that addresses roles and responsibilities, compliance requirements, and a communication plan. In practice, this means you can prove you establish and maintain response-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 high. Auditors expect a named owner, a remediation SLA, and a tooling artefact that evidences continuous operation.

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 17.4) 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.

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.
• Scope: response, incident response process, enterprise.

Evidence to collect

• Ticketing Workflow. ticketing_workflow evidence
• 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.

Workflow metrics (ServiceNow, Jira) show approvals and remediation. Signed policy or standard documents the safeguard. Focus: Establish and Maintain an Incident Response Process.

Common pitfalls

• Runbooks that name a role but no person, or list a paging channel that no longer exists.
• 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.

• SOC 2 (2017 TSC) CC7.4 — Incident Response
• NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 IR-6 — Incident Reporting
• NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 3 3.3.6 — Audit Record Reduction and Report Generation
• BSI C5:2020 SIM-01 — Policy for security incident management
• ISO/IEC 42001:2023 A.3.3 — Reporting of concerns

Related controls in CIS Controls v8

• Control 17.6 — Define Mechanisms for Communicating During Incident Response
• Control 17.7 — Conduct Routine Incident Response Exercises
• Control 5.3 — Disable Dormant Accounts
• Control 11.2 — Perform Automated Backups
• Control 17.3 — Establish and Maintain an Enterprise Process for Reporting Incidents
• Control 17.8 — Conduct Post-Incident Reviews

References

• Center for Internet Security — CIS Controls v8
• Catalogue identifier: Control 17.4

Topics: governance riskincident responsechange managementpolicy management