NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 CP-2(3) — Resume Mission And Business Functions

What this control requires

Plan for resuming essential functions within a defined timeframe post-disruption, guided by business continuity planning or impact analysis, prioritizing critical functions. This control supports the Recovery capability within the Contingency Planning family.

In plain English

Plan for resuming essential functions within a defined timeframe post-disruption, guided by business continuity planning or impact analysis, prioritizing critical functions. In practice, this means you can prove you policy management-level controls on a defined cadence.

Why it matters

SP 800-53 is the catalogue every U.S. federal authorisation (FedRAMP, FISMA, CMMC) and most regulated industries point at. A missing control surfaces as a Plan of Action & Milestones (POA&M) item that an Authorizing Official must approve before the Authority To Operate is granted or renewed.

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 3PAO (FedRAMP) or Independent Assessor (NIST RMF) tests against NIST SP 800-53A assessment procedures. For each control they expect a documented implementation that addresses every assessment objective (Examine, Interview, Test) and an implementation summary in the System Security Plan.

Within Contingency Planning, the assessor will trace your implementation back to the catalogue reference (Control CP-2(3)) and look for objective evidence on the latest two assessment cycles.

How to implement

Business Continuity

BC/DR. Define RTO/RPO per service, test backup restoration quarterly, and run a tabletop of full-region failover annually.

Backups. Immutable backups (S3 Object Lock / Azure immutable storage / GCS bucket lock) plus an air-gapped copy for ransomware resilience.

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

• Policy. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Control. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Plan. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Impact. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Resume. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Scope: management, mission, functions, analysis, recovery, capability, policy.

Evidence to collect

• Policy Document. A signed and version-controlled policy / standard / procedure document.

Signed policy or standard documents the safeguard. Focus: Resume Mission And Business Functions.

Common pitfalls

• DR plans that have never been tested in earnest, or that depend on an MFA token only one person can produce.
• 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.5.30 — ICT readiness for business continuity
• HIPAA (45 CFR Part 164) 164.308(a)(7)(ii)(B) — Contingency Plan -Disaster Recovery Plan
• BSI C5:2020 SP-01 — Documentation, communication and provision of policies and instructions
• SOC 2 (2017 TSC) CC2.3 — External Communication on Internal Control Matters

Related controls in NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5

• Control CP-2(5) — Continue Mission And Business Functions
• Control CP-2(4) — Resume All Mission And Business Functions
• Control CP-7(2) — Accessibility
• Control CP-7(4) — Preparation For Use
• Control CP-7 — Alternate Processing Site
• Control CP-2(6) — Alternate Processing And Storage Sites

References

• NIST Computer Security Resource Center — NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5
• Catalogue identifier: Control CP-2(3)

Topics: governance riskbusiness continuitypolicy management