KSI-CNA-IBP—Implementing Best Practices
Formerly KSI-CNA-07
>Control Description
>NIST 800-53 Controls
>Trust Center Components3
Ways to express your implementation of this indicator — approaches vary by organization size, complexity, and data sensitivity.
From the field: Mature implementations express backup reliability through operational dashboards — success rates, RPO/RTO compliance, and recovery test results as live metrics. Backup platforms report status via API, with failures triggering automated alerts. The backup policy becomes an artifact of the automated backup configuration, not the source of truth.
Backup Success Dashboard
Dashboard expressing backup health — success rates, RPO/RTO compliance, and recovery test results as live indicators
Recovery Testing Reports
Recovery test results demonstrating RPO/RTO objectives are met — evidence that backups actually work
Backup and Recovery Policy
Human-readable backup policy covering frequency, retention, encryption, and geographic separation — documents the intent behind automated backup configurations
>Programmatic Queries
CLI Commands
snyk iac test --reportsnyk iac test ./terraform/ --severity-threshold=medium>20x Assessment Focus Areas
Aligned with FedRAMP 20x Phase Two assessment methodology
Completeness & Coverage:
- •Does your best-practices compliance cover all cloud providers and services in use (AWS, Azure, GCP, or others), including managed databases, AI services, and networking features?
- •Are there provider security features or recommendations you have chosen not to implement, and how are those decisions documented and justified?
- •How do you ensure best-practice adherence for resources managed by third parties or partners who deploy within your authorization boundary?
- •When your cloud provider releases new security features or updates their best-practice guidance, what process ensures you evaluate and adopt them?
Automation & Validation:
- •What automated benchmarking tools (CIS Benchmarks, AWS Trusted Advisor, Azure Advisor, GCP Security Command Center) validate resources against provider best practices?
- •What happens when a resource is deployed that violates a provider best practice — is deployment blocked, or is the violation detected and flagged post-deployment?
- •How do you detect when provider best practices change and your existing resources become non-compliant with updated guidance?
- •What automated remediation runs when best-practice violations are detected, and what evidence shows it resolves findings without manual intervention?
Inventory & Integration:
- •How do you maintain a mapping between each cloud-native resource and the specific provider best-practice benchmarks it must meet?
- •What tools enforce provider best practices at deployment time (IaC policy scanners, admission webhooks) versus at runtime (CSPM)?
- •How do provider security advisories and feature announcements integrate into your change management workflow?
- •Are best-practice compliance results from different cloud providers aggregated into a single view, or reviewed separately per provider?
Continuous Evidence & Schedules:
- •How do you demonstrate continuous adherence to provider best practices rather than point-in-time compliance at assessment time?
- •Is best-practice compliance data available via API or dashboard showing current and historical conformance rates?
- •What evidence shows the delta between provider-recommended configurations and your actual configurations, and how that delta trends over time?
- •How often do you reconcile your implementations against updated provider guidance, and how do you prove each reconciliation was completed?
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