What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on SSO-05 Exit strategy for the receipt of benefits?

Documented exit strategy for each supplier rated as creating very high dependency; Transition cost and timeline estimate supporting one such exit strategy; Role assignment matrix naming who executes each transition activity; Defined service indicators and thresholds whose breach would start an exit.

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

Exit strategies written only for contract expiry, not for sudden supplier failure

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

`SSO-05` Exit strategy for the receipt of benefits

Define and document exit strategies for purchased services where the risk assessment found very high dependency, aligned with continuity planning and covering transition cost, impact, resource and timing analysis, assigned roles, success criteria, and performance indicators that trigger withdrawal.

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

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

Documented exit strategy for each supplier rated as creating very high dependency · Vendor register / contract repository
Transition cost and timeline estimate supporting one such exit strategy · Vendor register / contract repository
Role assignment matrix naming who executes each transition activity · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Defined service indicators and thresholds whose breach would start an exit · 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

Exit strategies written only for contract expiry, not for sudden supplier failure
No dependency threshold defined, so no supplier ever qualifies for an exit strategy
Exit planning not reconciled with the continuity plans it is meant to support
Criteria for judging a transition successful left undefined

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-04 Monitoring of compliance with requirements