What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on SSO-02 Risk assessment of service providers and suppliers?

Completed pre engagement risk assessments for a sample of newly onboarded suppliers; Annual reassessment schedule listing the date of the last review per supplier; Protection needs analysis recording confidentiality, integrity, availability and authenticity ratings; Dependency analysis noting substitutability and the alternative providers considered.

What is the most common gap auditors find on SSO-02?

Supplier began delivering before its assessment was completed

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

`SSO-02` Risk assessment of service providers and suppliers

Assess every service provider and supplier for risk before it contributes to the cloud service, and revalidate at least yearly, covering protection needs of the information handled, consequences of a breach, and dependency given service scope, complexity, uniqueness and available alternatives.

Source: BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue), SSO-02. 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

Completed pre engagement risk assessments for a sample of newly onboarded suppliers · Vendor register / contract repository
Protection needs analysis recording confidentiality, integrity, availability and authenticity ratings · Vendor register / contract repository

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Annual reassessment schedule listing the date of the last review per supplier · Vendor register / contract repository
Dependency analysis noting substitutability and the alternative providers considered · 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

Supplier began delivering before its assessment was completed
Reassessments overdue beyond twelve months for long standing suppliers
Scores recorded with no analysis of the impact a breach would have on service delivery
Dependency and absence of alternatives never evaluated

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

SSO-01 Policies and instructions for controlling and monitoring third parties · SSO-03 Directory of service providers and suppliers