CIS Controls v8 17.5 — Assign Key Roles and Responsibilities

What this control requires

Assign key roles and responsibilities for incident response, including staff from legal, IT, information security, facilities, public relations, human resources, incident responders, and analysts, as applicable. Review annually, or when significant enterprise changes occur that could impact this Safeguard.

In plain English

Assign key roles and responsibilities for incident response, including staff from legal, IT, information security, facilities, public relations, human resources, incident responders, and analysts, as applicable. In practice, this means you can prove you assign public-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 17.5) 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.

Operational checklist

• Assign. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Scope: public, response, information security, public relations, human resources, incident responders, analysts, applicable.

Evidence to collect

• Ticketing Workflow. ticketing_workflow evidence

Workflow metrics (ServiceNow, Jira) show approvals and remediation. Focus: Assign Key Roles and Responsibilities.

Common pitfalls

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

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.

• NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 IR-10 — Integrated Information Security Analysis Team
• ISO/IEC 27001:2022 A.5.27 — Learning from information security incidents

Related controls in CIS Controls v8

• Control 17.6 — Define Mechanisms for Communicating During Incident Response
• Control 17.4 — Establish and Maintain an Incident Response Process
• Control 17.9 — Establish and Maintain Security Incident Thresholds
• Control 17.7 — Conduct Routine Incident Response Exercises
• Control 17.8 — Conduct Post-Incident Reviews

References

• Center for Internet Security — CIS Controls v8
• Catalogue identifier: Control 17.5

Topics: incident responsechange managementkey management