What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on A.2.4.2 Temporary files?

Documented procedure naming temporary file locations and their retention period; Scheduled cleanup with execution evidence and failure alerting; Periodic verification that unused temporary files were actually removed; Inventory of temporary artefacts across the multi tenant platform, including per customer staging areas.

What is the most common gap auditors find on A.2.4.2?

Temporary artefacts of one customer's processing persisting on shared infrastructure after the task ends

ISO/IEC 27701:2025 · Annex A Table A.2 PIMS controls for PII processors

`A.2.4.2` Temporary files

The organization must make sure that temporary files produced while processing personal data are wiped or destroyed within a documented time limit, under documented procedures, and must check regularly that temporary files no longer in use have been removed within that limit. It should recognise that such files include rollback journals and files generated by database updates and by applications running; that they serve no purpose once the task that created them is finished; that some cannot be removed straight away; and that their lifespan is not always predictable, so a clean-up procedure should find them and establish how long ago each was last used.

Source: ISO/IEC 27701:2025, A.2.4.2. 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 27701:2025 in the compliance library.

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

Scheduled cleanup with execution evidence and failure alerting · SIEM / log platform

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Documented procedure naming temporary file locations and their retention period · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Periodic verification that unused temporary files were actually removed · Document repository
Inventory of temporary artefacts across the multi tenant platform, including per customer staging areas · 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

Temporary artefacts of one customer's processing persisting on shared infrastructure after the task ends
Cleanup jobs failing silently with no verification step to catch it
Procedure covering application temp directories while queues, caches and export staging go unmanaged
Retention period defined without any check that deletion happened
Customer data in debug and diagnostic files excluded because they are not seen as processing output

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.2.3.2 Comply with obligations to PII principals · A.2.4.3 Return, transfer or disposal of PII