NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 IR-4(14) — Security Operations Center : iCompaas Support

NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5·Control IR-4(14)·critical·Component: Incident Response

What this control requires

Maintain a Security Operations Center (SOC) to monitor, detect, analyze, and respond to cybersecurity incidents with skilled staff and tools for comprehensive situational awareness. This control supports the SOC Infrastructure and Personnel capability within the Incident Response family.
— NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5, Control IR-4(14)

In plain English

Maintain a Security Operations Center (SOC) to monitor, detect, analyze, and respond to cybersecurity incidents with skilled staff and tools for comprehensive situational awareness. In practice, this means you can prove you security 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 critical in the source catalogue. Treat gaps here as production incidents in the risk register, not housekeeping.

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-4(14)) 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.

Logging Monitoring

AWS. Org-trail CloudTrail to a central log archive account, GuardDuty in every region, and Security Hub for cross-source correlation.

Azure. Pipe every diagnostic setting into a central Log Analytics workspace; onboard Microsoft Sentinel for SIEM/SOAR.

GCP. Aggregate audit logs in a dedicated logging project with sink to BigQuery; enable Security Command Center Premium and route findings to Chronicle SIEM.

Operational checklist

Security. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
Response. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
Monitor. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
Control. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
Respond. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
Scope: management, personnel, incidents, monitor, capability, operations, operations center, tools.

Evidence to collect

Ticketing Workflow. ticketing_workflow evidence

Workflow metrics (ServiceNow, Jira) show approvals and remediation. Focus: Security Operations Center.

Common pitfalls

Runbooks that name a role but no person, or list a paging channel that no longer exists.
Per-account logging that nobody stitches together at the org level — incidents that cross accounts go undetected for days.

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.

Related controls in NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5

References

NIST Computer Security Resource Center — NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5
Catalogue identifier: Control IR-4(14)

Topics: incident responseawareness trainingchange managementlogging monitoring

NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 IR-4(14) — Security Operations Center