What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on A.5.9 Inventory of information and other associated assets?

Statement of Applicability entry for control A.5.9, showing inclusion or justified exclusion, implementation status and the risks it treats; The asset inventories (information, hardware, software, virtual, facilities and others) with owner, classification and location fields populated; Reconciliation records between inventories and discovery tooling, or evidence that installs, changes and removals update the inventory automatically; A procedure for assigning ownership on creation or acquisition and reassigning it when owners leave or change role; Records of periodic classification and access restriction reviews carried out by asset owners.

What is the most common gap auditors find on A.5.9?

The inventory covers hardware only and omits information assets, cloud services and software components

ISO/IEC 27001:2022 · Organizational controls

`A.5.9` Inventory of information and other associated assets

The organization is to build and keep current an inventory of its information and other associated assets, with their owners recorded. Purpose (stated in ISO/IEC 27002:2022): identifies the organization's information and associated assets so they can be protected and properly owned. As an Annex A reference control, it is compared with the controls determined in risk treatment (6.1.3 c) and recorded in the Statement of Applicability as included or excluded, with the justification and implementation status (6.1.3 d); implementation guidance is ISO/IEC 27002:2022 5.9.

Source: ISO/IEC 27001:2022, A.5.9. 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 ISO/IEC 27001:2022 in the compliance library.

Clauses 4 to 10 are the management-system requirements: none of them can be excluded when an organisation claims conformity. The 93 Annex A controls are a reference set: one may be excluded with a justification in the Statement of Applicability. Certification bodies assess conformity; the evidence lists here are what auditors commonly ask for, not a list the standard prescribes.

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

Reconciliation records between inventories and discovery tooling, or evidence that installs, changes and removals update the inventory automatically · Policy repository / GRC workspace

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Records of periodic classification and access restriction reviews carried out by asset owners · Data governance / DLP tooling

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Statement of Applicability entry for control A.5.9, showing inclusion or justified exclusion, implementation status and the risks it treats · Policy repository / GRC workspace
The asset inventories (information, hardware, software, virtual, facilities and others) with owner, classification and location fields populated · Policy repository / GRC workspace
A procedure for assigning ownership on creation or acquisition and reassigning it when owners leave or change role · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

Mostly documents and reviews. Pull the 1 system-held artefact from your Policy repository / GRC workspace 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

The inventory covers hardware only and omits information assets, cloud services and software components
Owners listed are people who have left or generic team names with no accountable individual
The inventory drifts from reality because no reconciliation or automated update exists
Disposed assets remain in the inventory, or live assets never entered it

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

A.5.8 Information security in project management · A.5.10 Acceptable use of information and other associated assets