What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on SEF-02 Service Management Policy and Procedures?

Incident handling procedure stating response and resolution time targets per severity; Incident tickets or case records showing time to acknowledge, contain and close against those targets; Escalation matrix with on-call rota and contact paths; Annual review record of the timeliness procedures, plus any change-driven revision; Management report on incidents that breached their handling targets and the follow-up.

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

Time targets defined in the policy but not tracked in the ticketing tool

CSA CCM v4.1 · SEF - Security Incident Management, E-Discovery, & Cloud Forensics

`SEF-02` Service Management Policy and Procedures

The organisation maintains approved and applied policies and procedures that make sure security incidents are dealt with within defined timeframes, evaluates how well they work, and revisits them yearly at minimum or when something significant changes.

Source: CSA CCM v4.1, SEF-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 CSA CCM v4.1 in the compliance library.

Version 4.1 adds 11 controls (among them API security, log sanitisation and a service bill of materials) and renumbers several domains. CSA accepts v4.0.x during its transition; if your STAR assessment is still on v4.0.1, check the numbering against it.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

hard

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

Incident tickets or case records showing time to acknowledge, contain and close against those targets · Ticketing / ITSM

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Annual review record of the timeliness procedures, plus any change-driven revision · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Management report on incidents that breached their handling targets and the follow-up · Policy repository / GRC workspace

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Incident handling procedure stating response and resolution time targets per severity · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Escalation matrix with on-call rota and contact paths · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

Mostly documents and reviews. Pull the 1 system-held artefact from your Ticketing / ITSM on a schedule; put the documents under version control with an owner and review date, and log each review as a dated record with a named reviewer.

Common gaps auditors find

Time targets defined in the policy but not tracked in the ticketing tool
No distinction between severities, so critical incidents queue behind routine ones
Procedures not revised after a reorganisation or a change of managed security provider

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

SEF-01 Security Incident Management Policy and Procedures · SEF-03 Incident Response Plans