What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on CP-8 Telecommunications Services?

SSP CP-8 statement describing alternate telecommunications (diverse carriers, redundant connectivity) and priority service agreements; Carrier contracts or cloud connectivity design showing diverse paths without a single point of failure; Annual tabletop and full failover test reports; Alternate processing site contract and capacity attestation; Restoration test logs with success criteria signed off; Business impact analysis identifying critical systems.

What is the most common gap auditors find on CP-8?

Tabletop exercises lack participation from business owners

FedRAMP Moderate (NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 baseline) · CP - Contingency Planning

`CP-8` Telecommunications Services

Establish alternate telecommunications services with agreements to permit resumption of system operations.

Source: FedRAMP Moderate (NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 baseline), CP-8. 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

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

Restoration test logs with success criteria signed off · Backup / DR tooling

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Annual tabletop and full failover test reports · Backup / DR tooling
Alternate processing site contract and capacity attestation · Vendor register / contract repository

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

SSP CP-8 statement describing alternate telecommunications (diverse carriers, redundant connectivity) and priority service agreements · Vendor register / contract repository
Carrier contracts or cloud connectivity design showing diverse paths without a single point of failure · Vendor register / contract repository
Business impact analysis identifying critical systems · Document repository

First move

Mostly documents and reviews. Pull the 1 system-held artefact from your Backup / DR tooling 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

Tabletop exercises lack participation from business owners
Alternate site capacity not validated against current load
Plan not updated after major architecture changes

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

CP-7(3) Alternate Processing Site | Priority of Service (CP-7(3)) · CP-8(1) Telecommunications Services | Priority of Service Provisions (CP-8(1))