What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on A.8.6 Capacity management?

Statement of Applicability entry for control A.8.6, showing inclusion or justified exclusion, implementation status and the risks it treats; Capacity requirements for critical systems, facilities and teams reflecting business criticality; Monitoring dashboards and alert thresholds for key resources such as CPU, memory, storage, bandwidth and licences; Stress or load test results confirming capacity for peak demand; Capacity forecasts considering new business requirements, trends and long lead-time or high-cost resources.

What is the most common gap auditors find on A.8.6?

Capacity is managed reactively after outages

ISO/IEC 27001:2022 · Technological controls

`A.8.6` Capacity management

Resource use is to be monitored and adjusted to fit present and expected capacity needs. Purpose (stated in ISO/IEC 27002:2022): keeps enough capacity available in systems, staff, offices and other facilities. 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 8.6.

Source: ISO/IEC 27001:2022, A.8.6. 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

none for this control

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Stress or load test results confirming capacity for peak demand · Source control / CI pipeline

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Statement of Applicability entry for control A.8.6, showing inclusion or justified exclusion, implementation status and the risks it treats · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Capacity requirements for critical systems, facilities and teams reflecting business criticality · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Monitoring dashboards and alert thresholds for key resources such as CPU, memory, storage, bandwidth and licences · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Capacity forecasts considering new business requirements, trends and long lead-time or high-cost resources · 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

Capacity is managed reactively after outages
Load testing is never done before peak business periods
Dependence on single key individuals is not treated as a capacity risk
Cloud autoscaling limits are set without considering cost or quota ceilings

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

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