BSI C5 · Control OPS-09 · Priority: critical · Component: Operations Security

What this control covers

Transfers encrypted backups to secure remote locations with equivalent security measures as main sites. Ensures sufficient distance to meet recovery times, protecting cloud customer data from site-specific disasters and ensuring availability.

Why it matters

Encryption and key management make data unreadable to attackers and unintelligible under data-breach safe-harbour clauses — a meaningful regulatory benefit.

How to implement

AWS

Default to SSE-KMS with customer-managed keys for S3/EBS/RDS/Secrets Manager. Use S3 Bucket Keys and S3 Block Public Access at the account level, and turn on S3 Object Lock on backup buckets for ransomware resilience.

Azure

Store secrets in Key Vault (HSM-backed where required) with soft-delete + purge protection; use customer-managed keys for Storage, SQL, and Azure Disk Encryption. Tag PII data via Microsoft Purview.

GCP

Use Cloud KMS with customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) for BigQuery, GCS, and Compute. Sensitive Data Protection (DLP API) inspects/de-identifies PII at scale.

Google Workspace

Enable client-side encryption for Drive/Docs and turn on Drive Labels + DLP rules to prevent external sharing of regulated data classes.

Evidence to collect

  • infra_scan — See the iCompaas Evidence library for the canonical source for this evidence type.

Infrastructure posture tooling (AWS Config, Azure Policy, Nessus) verifies platform hardening. Focus: Data Backup and Recovery - Storage.

Quick checklist

  • Security — Measures / Protection
  • Protection — Measures / Protection
  • Data — Measures / Protection
  • Data Backup — Measures / Protection
  • Secure — Measures / Protection
  • Business — Measures / Protection

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