What this control covers
This control requires the development of a comprehensive incident response plan that outlines the organization's approach to incident response, including its structure, reportable incidents, sharing of incident information, and assigned responsibilities. The plan must be distributed to designated personnel, updated regularly, and protected from unauthorized disclosure to ensure effective incident management. This control supports the Incident Response Management 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).
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.infra_scan— See the iCompaas Evidence library for the canonical source for this evidence type.
Workflow metrics (ServiceNow, Jira) show approvals and remediation. Focus: Incident Response Plan.
Quick checklist
- Information — Management / Response Plan
- Response — Management / Response Plan
- Incident — Management / Response Plan
- Personnel — Management / Response Plan
- Plan — Management / Response Plan
Related articles on this site
- Ensure Diagnostic Setting captures appropriate categories from the control/management plane
- Change Control
- NIST 800-171 3.4.1 Establish and maintain baseline configurations and inventories of organizational systems (including hardware, software, firmware, and documentation) throughout the respective system development life cycles.
- 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.