What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on RA-7 Risk Response?

Risk response plan or POA&M showing decisions per finding; Evidence findings from assessments and continuous monitoring feed the response process; Records showing accepted risks are approved at the right level.

What is the most common gap auditors find on RA-7?

findings logged but never dispositioned

FedRAMP Moderate (NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 baseline) · RA - Risk Assessment

`RA-7` Risk Response

Requires the organisation to respond to findings from security and privacy assessments, monitoring and audits, so that identified risk is treated rather than only recorded.

Source: FedRAMP Moderate (NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 baseline), RA-7. 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

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

none for this control

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Evidence findings from assessments and continuous monitoring feed the response process · SIEM / log platform
Records showing accepted risks are approved at the right level · Document repository

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Risk response plan or POA&M showing decisions per finding · Policy repository / GRC workspace

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

findings logged but never dispositioned
risk acceptance without documented authority
no link between monitoring output and response decisions

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

RA-5(11) Vulnerability Monitoring and Scanning | Public Disclosure Program (RA-5(11)) · RA-9 Criticality Analysis (RA-9)