NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 IR-3(2) — Coordination With Related Plans

What this control requires

Coordinate incident response testing with elements responsible for related plans (e.g., business continuity, disaster recovery) to ensure cohesive preparation and response. This control supports the Coordination capability within the Incident Response family.

In plain English

Coordinate incident response testing with elements responsible for related plans (e.g., business continuity, disaster recovery) to ensure cohesive preparation and response. In practice, this means you can prove you response 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 Incident Response, the assessor will trace your implementation back to the catalogue reference (Control IR-3(2)) 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.

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

• Response. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Control. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Testing,. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Coordinate. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Recovery. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
• Scope: management, e, recovery, capability, response.

Evidence to collect

• Ticketing Workflow. ticketing_workflow evidence

Workflow metrics (ServiceNow, Jira) show approvals and remediation. Focus: Coordination With Related Plans.

Common pitfalls

• DR plans that have never been tested in earnest, or that depend on an MFA token only one person can produce.
• 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.

• SOC 2 (2017 TSC) CC7.5 — Security Incident Recovery Activities
• NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 3 3.6.2 — Incident Monitoring, Reporting, and Response Assistance
• CIS Controls v8 11.5 — Test Data Recovery
• ISO/IEC 27001:2022 A.5.27 — Learning from information security incidents
• BSI C5:2020 OPS-21 — Involvement of Cloud customers in the event of incidents

Related controls in NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5

• Control CP-2(1) — Coordinate With Related Plans
• Control IR-4 — Incident Handling
• Control CP-2 — Contingency Plan
• Control IR-4(15) — Public Relations And Reputation Repair
• Control IR-6 — Incident Reporting
• Control IR-7(1) — Automation Support For Availability Of Information And Support

References

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

Topics: incident responsebusiness continuitychange managementbackup recovery