What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on CM-9 Configuration Management Plan?

SSP CM-9 statement summarising the configuration management plan: roles, configuration items, naming scheme and change process; Approved configuration management plan listing configuration items and their owners; Configuration management policy and change control procedure; Approved baseline configurations for each platform family; Change advisory board minutes with risk assessments; Configuration drift detection reports from the CMDB or tooling.

What is the most common gap auditors find on CM-9?

Unauthorised software present on endpoints not flagged by tooling

FedRAMP Moderate (NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 baseline) · CM - Configuration Management

`CM-9` Configuration Management Plan

Develop, document, implement configuration management plan addressing roles, processes, items under CM, identification scheme.

Source: FedRAMP Moderate (NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 baseline), CM-9. 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 FedRAMP Moderate (NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 baseline) in the compliance library.

A FedRAMP baseline is a subset of NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5, enhancements included.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

moderate

to go live

Cloud console / configuration management

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

Approved baseline configurations for each platform family · Cloud console / configuration management
Configuration drift detection reports from the CMDB or tooling · Cloud console / configuration management

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Change advisory board minutes with risk assessments · Cloud console / configuration management

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

SSP CM-9 statement summarising the configuration management plan: roles, configuration items, naming scheme and change process · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Approved configuration management plan listing configuration items and their owners · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Configuration management policy and change control procedure · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

Start with the 2 of 6 artefacts that already live in a system (Cloud console / configuration management); keep the periodic reviews but log each one as a dated record with a named reviewer.

Common gaps auditors find

Unauthorised software present on endpoints not flagged by tooling
Hardening benchmarks applied at build but not re evaluated annually
Asset inventory missing cloud workloads and ephemeral resources

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

CM-8(3) Automated Unauthorized Component Detection · CM-10 Software Usage Restrictions