# NIST800 171 3.6.5 — Incident Response Plan

- Source: https://support.icompaas.com/support/solutions/articles/a_gen_nist800171_365_207a34843f-nist800-171-365-incident-response-plan
- Section: [Solutions](https://support.icompaas.com/support/solutions) › [NIST SP 800-171 Readiness](https://support.icompaas.com/support/solutions/c_gen_nist800171) › [Incident Response](https://support.icompaas.com/support/solutions/folders/f_gen_cgennist800171_incidentresponse)
- Last updated: 2026-05-30
- Publisher: iCompaas, Inc. (https://www.icompaas.com)

NIST800 171 · Control 3.6.5 · Priority: critical · Component: Incident Response

### 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](https://support.icompaas.com/support/solutions/articles/62000219824--ensure-diagnostic-setting-captures-appropriate-categories-from-the-control-management-plane)
-   [Change Control](https://support.icompaas.com/support/solutions/articles/62000225167-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.](https://support.icompaas.com/support/solutions/articles/62000229280-nist-800-171-3-4-1-establish-and-maintain-baseline-configurations-and-inventories-of-organizational-s)
-   [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.](https://support.icompaas.com/support/solutions/articles/62000229301-nist-800-171-3-6-1-establish-an-operational-incident-handling-capability-for-organizational-systems-t)

## Related compliance guidance

- [NIST SP 800-171 and CMMC: a practical guide to protecting CUI in the cloud](https://support.icompaas.com/compliance/nist-sp-800-171-rev-3): The CUI requirements CMMC Level 2 assesses, the SPRS score, POA&M rules and the phased DFARS rollout.
- [NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5: a practical implementation guide for cloud teams](https://support.icompaas.com/compliance/nist-sp-800-53-rev-5): The federal catalogue 800-171 is derived from — useful when a contract also cites a FedRAMP baseline.