CP-2·high·Component: Contingency PlanningWhat this control requires
Develop and maintain a contingency plan to ensure continuity of essential functions during disruptions. Define recovery objectives, roles, restoration steps, and align with incident response. Review/update regularly and protect from unauthorized access. This control supports the Planning capability within the Contingency Planning family.
In plain English
Develop and maintain a contingency plan to ensure continuity of essential functions during disruptions. In practice, this means you can prove you access 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) 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.
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.
Operational checklist
- Access. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
- Review. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
- Response. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
- Unauthorized. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
- Control. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
- Scope: management, functions, review, contingency plan, recovery, capability, roles, response.
Evidence to collect
- Ticketing Workflow.
ticketing_workflowevidence
Workflow metrics (ServiceNow, Jira) show approvals and remediation. Focus: Contingency Plan.
Common pitfalls
- Runbooks that name a role but no person, or list a paging channel that no longer exists.
- DR plans that have never been tested in earnest, or that depend on an MFA token only one person can produce.
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) CC7.5 — Security Incident Recovery Activities
- NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 3 3.6.1 — Incident Handling
- CIS Controls v8 11.5 — Test Data Recovery
Related controls in NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5
- Control CP-2(1) — Coordinate With Related Plans
- Control IR-3(2) — Coordination With Related Plans
- Control CP-4(1) — Coordinate With Related Plans
- Control IR-4 — Incident Handling
- Control SA-15(10) — Incident Response Plan
- Control CP-10(5) — Failover Capability
References
- NIST Computer Security Resource Center — NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5
- Catalogue identifier:
Control CP-2
Topics: incident responsebusiness continuitychange managementbackup recovery