What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on A.8.9 Configuration management?

Statement of Applicability entry for control A.8.9, showing inclusion or justified exclusion, implementation status and the risks it treats; Approved secure configuration templates or baselines for each platform, derived from vendor or independent guidance, with review dates; Configuration records or a CMDB showing owner, last change date, template version and relationships between assets; Change records showing configuration changes passed through change management; Configuration compliance scan results comparing actual settings with templates, and records of deviations corrected.

What is the most common gap auditors find on A.8.9?

Baselines exist on paper but systems are never measured against them

ISO/IEC 27001:2022 · Technological controls

`A.8.9` Configuration management

The organization is to set, record, apply, watch and review how its hardware, software, services and networks are configured, security settings included. Purpose (stated in ISO/IEC 27002:2022): ensures systems and networks work correctly with required security settings and are not changed without approval or by mistake. 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 8.9.

Source: ISO/IEC 27001:2022, A.8.9. 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

easy

to go live

Vendor register / contract repository

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

Approved secure configuration templates or baselines for each platform, derived from vendor or independent guidance, with review dates · Vendor register / contract repository
Configuration records or a CMDB showing owner, last change date, template version and relationships between assets · Cloud console / configuration management
Change records showing configuration changes passed through change management · Ticketing / ITSM
Configuration compliance scan results comparing actual settings with templates, and records of deviations corrected · Vulnerability scanner / patch tooling

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

none for this control

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Statement of Applicability entry for control A.8.9, showing inclusion or justified exclusion, implementation status and the risks it treats · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

Automate the pull from your Vendor register / contract repository. Vendor register with review dates and attached assurance reports; expiry-driven reminders, not an annual scramble.

Common gaps auditors find

Baselines exist on paper but systems are never measured against them
Cloud service configurations are outside configuration management
Templates are not updated when new software versions are introduced
Emergency configuration changes bypass change management and are never reconciled

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.8.8 Management of technical vulnerabilities · A.8.10 Information deletion