What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on STA-04 SSRM Guidance?

Published shared responsibility guide or customer responsibility matrix; Product documentation sections telling customers which controls they must configure; Management approval and version history of the guidance; Record of how customers are told when the guidance changes.

What is the most common gap auditors find on STA-04?

Guidance only covers the provider layer and ignores sub-processors

CSA CCM v4.1 · STA - Supply Chain Management, Transparency, and Accountability

`STA-04` SSRM Guidance

The organisation gives its service customers guidance on the shared security responsibility model that explains how it applies across the supply chain behind the service.

Source: CSA CCM v4.1, STA-04. 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

moderate

to go live

Document 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

Management approval and version history of the guidance · Document repository

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Record of how customers are told when the guidance changes · Document repository

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Published shared responsibility guide or customer responsibility matrix · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Product documentation sections telling customers which controls they must configure · Document repository

First move

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

Common gaps auditors find

Guidance only covers the provider layer and ignores sub-processors
Guidance out of step with current product features
No version control, so customers cannot tell what changed

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

STA-03 SSRM Supply Chain · STA-05 SSRM Control Ownership