What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on IR-1 Preparation - update incident response plan and handling process?

Incident response plan covering cloud platforms; Shared responsibility analysis per service model in use; Named roles and escalation paths; Plan review and update history.

What is the most common gap auditors find on IR-1?

an on-premises plan reused unchanged for cloud

Azure Security Benchmark v3 (renamed Microsoft cloud security benchmark) · Incident Response

`IR-1` Preparation - update incident response plan and handling process

Develop and maintain processes and plans for responding to security incidents on cloud platforms, accounting for the shared responsibility model and how it varies across infrastructure, platform and software service models.

Source: Azure Security Benchmark v3 (renamed Microsoft cloud security benchmark), IR-1. The statement above is our statement of the clause, read from the published text and cited so you can check it against the official text, not the instrument verbatim. Open Azure Security Benchmark v3 (renamed Microsoft cloud security benchmark) in the compliance library.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

moderate

to go live

Policy repository / GRC workspace

where the evidence lives

teal = a system already holds it · olive = produced at each review. To go live: easy when half or more of the artefacts are already held by a system, moderate from a quarter to a half, hard below a quarter.

These are the artefacts auditors commonly ask for on this requirement, our guidance rather than text from the standard. Your assessor decides what is sufficient in your context, and asks for samples across the period when a report covers one.

system holds itEvidence a system already holds

Plan review and update history · Policy repository / GRC workspace

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Shared responsibility analysis per service model in use · Document repository

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Incident response plan covering cloud platforms · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Named roles and escalation paths · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

Start with the 1 of 4 artefacts that already live in a system (Policy repository / GRC workspace); keep the periodic reviews but log each one as a dated record with a named reviewer.

Common gaps auditors find

an on-premises plan reused unchanged for cloud
no analysis of what the provider handles versus the customer
plan never reviewed after the service estate changed

Do this for your whole sheet

Paste the rows you run your controls from and get this mapping for every control at once, with the periodic-review ones flagged and a first move per row. No account for the first run.

Build my evidence sheet

IM-9 Secure user access to existing applications · IR-2 Preparation - setup incident notification