What this control covers
This control requires implementing an incident-handling capability that aligns with the organization's incident response plan. The capability should include preparation, detection, analysis, containment, eradication, and recovery, involving coordination across various organizational entities, such as security, legal, and operational teams. This control supports the Incident Handling Capability capability within the Incident Response (3.6) family.
Why it matters
How quickly and methodically you contain an incident determines the regulatory consequence — most fines are not for the breach itself but for the slow or absent response.
How to implement
AWS
Wire GuardDuty, Security Hub and Macie findings into your ticketing/SIEM via EventBridge. Maintain documented playbooks for IAM-key compromise, EC2 instance compromise, S3 data exposure, and run quarterly tabletop exercises.
Azure
Use Defender for Cloud + Microsoft Sentinel with playbooks (Logic Apps) for automated containment — disable user, isolate VM (NSG), revoke session tokens. Keep an on-call rotation in Teams with PagerDuty.
GCP
Org Policy Service for guardrails and Config Validator in CI to pre-check Terraform plans against policy as code (Rego).
Google Workspace
Google Vault retention rules cover Gmail/Drive/Chat; combine with periodic third-party backups (e.g., Spanning, Backupify) for full restore-by-user.
GitHub
Subscribe to secret-scanning alerts and Dependabot security advisories; require triage SLAs by severity. For exposed secrets, rotate at the cloud provider FIRST then revoke at GitHub — order matters.
Evidence to collect
ticketing_workflow— See the iCompaas Evidence library for the canonical source for this evidence type.
Workflow metrics (ServiceNow, Jira) show approvals and remediation. Focus: Incident Handling.
Quick checklist
- Response — Management / Preparation
- Incident — Management / Preparation
- Security — Management / Preparation
- Plan — Management / Preparation
Related articles on this site
- NIST 800-171 3.6.1 Establish an operational incident-handling capability for organizational systems that includes preparation, detection, analysis, containment, recovery, and user response activities.
- CMMC 2.0 IR.2.092 Establish an operational incident-handling capability for organizational systems that includes preparation, detection, analysis, containment, recovery, and user response activities.
- NIST 800-171 3.6.3 Test the organizational incident response capability.
- Ensure Amazon EBS volumes should be protected by a backup plan.