What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on 7.3 Securing offices, rooms and facilities?

Facility security design documentation showing critical facilities sited away from public access; Photographs or survey records confirming the absence of signage revealing processing facilities; Assessments of visual and acoustic leakage from meeting rooms and processing areas, with mitigations such as window film or sound insulation; Electromagnetic shielding assessments where relevant; Controls restricting access to directories, floor plans and online maps showing sensitive facility locations.

What is the most common gap auditors find on 7.3?

Data rooms are labelled or signposted for convenience

ISO/IEC 27002:2022 · Physical controls

`7.3` Securing offices, rooms and facilities

The organization is to design and implement physical protection for its offices, rooms and facilities. Purpose: keep intruders out of these spaces and protect the information and assets in them from harm or tampering. Guidance: consider locating critical facilities where the public cannot reach them; where relevant, keeping buildings unobtrusive with minimal indication of their purpose and no obvious signs inside or out that information processing takes place; arranging facilities so confidential information and activities cannot be seen or heard from outside, and considering electromagnetic shielding where appropriate; and keeping directories, internal phone lists and online maps that show where confidential processing facilities are located out of the hands of unauthorized people.

Source: ISO/IEC 27002:2022, 7.3. 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 27002:2022 in the compliance library.

ISO/IEC 27002 is guidance on the Annex A controls; certification is against ISO/IEC 27001. Use this set when your sheet follows the 27002 numbering.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

hard

to go live

Physical access / facilities

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

Photographs or survey records confirming the absence of signage revealing processing facilities · Physical access / facilities
Assessments of visual and acoustic leakage from meeting rooms and processing areas, with mitigations such as window film or sound insulation · Physical access / facilities
Electromagnetic shielding assessments where relevant · Physical access / facilities

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Facility security design documentation showing critical facilities sited away from public access · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Controls restricting access to directories, floor plans and online maps showing sensitive facility locations · 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

Data rooms are labelled or signposted for convenience
Screens and whiteboards in sensitive rooms are visible from the street
Internal maps showing server room locations are published on the intranet or public sites
Critical equipment is placed in areas the public can reach

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

7.2 Physical entry · 7.4 Physical security monitoring