What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on A.8.32 Change management?

Statement of Applicability entry for control A.8.32, showing inclusion or justified exclusion, implementation status and the risks it treats; The documented change management procedure covering infrastructure and software, integrated where practical; Change records showing impact and dependency assessment, authorization, stakeholder communication, testing and acceptance, deployment plan and fallback; Emergency change records with retrospective review and approval; Evidence that operating documentation, user procedures and ICT continuity plans were updated after changes.

What is the most common gap auditors find on A.8.32?

Changes are made directly in production without a change record

ISO/IEC 27001:2022 · Technological controls

`A.8.32` Change management

Every change to information systems and processing facilities is to pass through the change management procedures. Purpose (stated in ISO/IEC 27002:2022): preserves information security when changes are executed. 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 8.32.

Source: ISO/IEC 27001:2022, A.8.32. 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

moderate

to go live

Source control / CI pipeline

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

Change records showing impact and dependency assessment, authorization, stakeholder communication, testing and acceptance, deployment plan and fallback · Source control / CI pipeline
Emergency change records with retrospective review and approval · Document repository

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Evidence that operating documentation, user procedures and ICT continuity plans were updated after changes · Policy repository / GRC workspace

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Statement of Applicability entry for control A.8.32, showing inclusion or justified exclusion, implementation status and the risks it treats · Policy repository / GRC workspace
The documented change management procedure covering infrastructure and software, integrated where practical · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

Start with the 2 of 5 artefacts that already live in a system (Source control / CI pipeline); keep the periodic reviews but log each one as a dated record with a named reviewer.

Common gaps auditors find

Changes are made directly in production without a change record
Emergency changes are never reviewed after the fact
Impact assessment ignores dependencies, causing unexpected outages
Continuity plans and runbooks are not updated after infrastructure 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

A.8.31 Separation of development, test and production environments · A.8.33 Test information