What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on COS-05 Networks for administration?

Topology drawing showing management networks distinct from tenant-facing segments; Access path evidence requiring more than one factor to reach a management console; Configuration of the segment carrying virtual machine creation and migration traffic; Rule set blocking routing between management and tenant segments.

What is the most common gap auditors find on COS-05?

Administrators connect to consoles from ordinary office workstations on the general corporate network

BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) · C5: Communication Security

`COS-05` Networks for administration

Run infrastructure administration and management consoles on networks held physically or logically apart from customer networks and reachable only with multi-factor authentication, and likewise separate the networks used to create or migrate virtual machines.

Source: BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue), COS-05. 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 BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) in the compliance library.

The edition of the catalogue is not stamped here; check the edition your attestation is issued against.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

moderate

to go live

Cloud console / configuration management

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

Configuration of the segment carrying virtual machine creation and migration traffic · Cloud console / configuration management

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Access path evidence requiring more than one factor to reach a management console · Policy repository / GRC workspace

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Topology drawing showing management networks distinct from tenant-facing segments · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Rule set blocking routing between management and tenant segments · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

Start with the 1 of 4 artefacts that already live in a system (Cloud console / configuration management); keep the periodic reviews but log each one as a dated record with a named reviewer.

Common gaps auditors find

Administrators connect to consoles from ordinary office workstations on the general corporate network
Hypervisor migration traffic shares a segment with productive tenant traffic
Out-of-band management interfaces answer with a single factor of authentication

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

COS-04 Cross-network access · COS-06 Segregation of data traffic in jointly used network environments