What this control covers
Monitoring physical access to facilities where the system resides to detect and respond to physical security incidents. This includes reviewing access logs at specified intervals and coordinating results with the organization's incident response capability. Monitoring can include guards, surveillance equipment, and sensor devices, with reviews aimed at identifying suspicious or anomalous access patterns. This control supports the Physical Access Monitoring capability within the Physical and Environmental Protection family.
Why it matters
You cannot investigate or attest what you did not log. This control underpins every incident-response capability and is what auditors will sample from for control operating effectiveness.
How to implement
AWS
Turn on a multi-region, organisation-wide CloudTrail trail with log-file validation and ship to a dedicated, write-once log archive account. Enable CloudTrail Lake or stream to OpenSearch/Splunk for search. Pair with GuardDuty, Security Hub, and VPC Flow Logs.
Azure
Send Activity logs + diagnostic logs from every subscription to a central Log Analytics workspace. Stand up Microsoft Sentinel for SIEM/SOAR with the Azure, M365 and IdP connectors and pre-built analytics rules.
GCP
Centralize via Cloud Logging log sinks at the org level to a locked log bucket with 7-year retention. Use SCC Premium for posture findings and Chronicle for SIEM correlation.
Google Workspace
Forward the Admin, Login, Drive, Token and Mobile audit logs to Cloud Logging (Workspace BigQuery export). Alert on impossible-travel logins, OAuth-scope grants for high-risk scopes, and external Drive sharing of sensitive labels.
GitHub
Stream the Enterprise audit log to your SIEM and enable Audit Log API alerting on key events: owner changes, IP allowlist edits, secret deletions, repo visibility flips.
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: Monitoring Physical Access.
Quick checklist
- Access — Management / Reviews
- Security — Management / Reviews
- Physical — Management / Reviews
- Protection — Management / Reviews
- Suspicious — Management / Reviews
- Environmental — Management / Reviews
Related articles on this site
- NIST 800-171 3.14.3 Monitor system security alerts and advisories and take action in response.
- NIST 800-171 3.3.1 Create and retain system audit logs and records to the extent needed to enable the monitoring, analysis, investigation, and reporting of unlawful or unauthorized system activity
- 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.
- NIST 800-171 3.10.4 Maintain audit logs of physical access.