A.8.34 Protection of information systems during audit testing
Audit tests and other assurance activities that assess operational systems need a plan agreed in advance by whoever tests and the relevant managers. Purpose (stated in ISO/IEC 27002:2022): keeps the disruption audits and assurance work cause to live systems and business processes small. 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 8.34.
Source: ISO/IEC 27001:2022, A.8.34. 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.
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
- Management approvals of auditor access requests and agreed scopes for technical audit tests · Policy repository / GRC workspace
- Evidence that auditor access was read-only, or that tests were run by an authorized administrator on the auditor's behalf · Document repository
- Security checks of auditor devices (patching, anti-malware) before access was granted · Vulnerability scanner / patch tooling
- Records of isolated file copies provided for audit and their deletion or protection afterwards · Policy repository / GRC workspace
governing documentDocuments that govern the control
- Statement of Applicability entry for control A.8.34, showing inclusion or justified exclusion, implementation status and the risks it treats · Policy repository / GRC workspace
First move
Common gaps auditors find
- External auditors are given full administrative accounts on production systems
- Audit tools are run in production during peak business hours without agreement
- Auditor laptops connect to internal networks without any security check
- Audit accounts remain active after the audit ends
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.
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