What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on SSO-01 Policies and instructions for controlling and monitoring third parties?

Approved third party control policy with version history and publication record; Distribution list showing which procurement and legal staff received the policy; Template contract clause library covering security, training and vulnerability obligations; Classification rubric distinguishing subcontractors from other suppliers.

What is the most common gap auditors find on SSO-01?

Policy silent on flow down of obligations to a supplier's own subcontractors

BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) · C5: Control and Monitoring of Service Providers and Suppliers

`SSO-01` Policies and instructions for controlling and monitoring third parties

Document, communicate and make available policies governing third parties whose services support the cloud service, covering procurement risk assessment, subcontractor classification, security and training obligations, legal duties, vulnerability handling, contractual wording, monitoring, and flow down to their own providers.

Source: BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue), SSO-01. 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

hard

to go live

Vendor register / contract repository

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

none for this control

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

none for this control

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Approved third party control policy with version history and publication record · Vendor register / contract repository
Distribution list showing which procurement and legal staff received the policy · Vendor register / contract repository
Template contract clause library covering security, training and vulnerability obligations · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Classification rubric distinguishing subcontractors from other suppliers · Vendor register / contract repository

First move

No system holds this evidence for you: it is people and documents. Reminders and routing to the owner still save time. Put the document under version control with an owner and review date, and log each review as a record with reviewer and date.

Common gaps auditors find

Policy silent on flow down of obligations to a supplier's own subcontractors
No documented rule for deciding when a third party counts as a subcontractor
Policy exists but was never issued to the teams that sign supplier contracts

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

SP-03 Exceptions from Existing Policies and Instructions · SSO-02 Risk assessment of service providers and suppliers