STA: Supply Chain Management, Transparency, and Accountability

Providers shall inspect, account for, and work with their cloud supply-chain partners to correct data quality errors and associated risks. Providers shall design and implement controls to mitigate and contain data security risks through proper separation of duties, role-based access, and least-privilege access for all personnel within their supply chain.

The provider shall make security incident information available to all affected customers and providers periodically through electronic methods (e.g., portals).

Business-critical or customer (tenant) impacting (physical and virtual) application and system-system interface (API) designs and configurations, and infrastructure network and systems components, shall be designed, developed, and deployed in accordance with mutually agreed-upon service and capacity-level expectations, as well as IT governance and service management policies and procedures.

The provider shall perform annual internal assessments of conformance to, and effectiveness of, its policies, procedures, and supporting measures and metrics.

Supply chain agreements (e.g., SLAs) between providers and customers (tenants) shall incorporate at least the following mutually-agreed upon provisions and/or terms: Scope of business relationship and services offered (e.g., customer (tenant) data acquisition, exchange and usage, feature sets and functionality, personnel and infrastructure network and systems components for service delivery and support, roles and responsibilities…

Providers shall review the risk management and governance processes of their partners so that practices are consistent and aligned to account for risks inherited from other members of that partner’s cloud supply chain.

Policies and procedures shall be implemented to ensure the consistent review of service agreements (e.g., SLAs) between providers and customers (tenants) across the relevant supply chain (upstream/downstream). Reviews shall be performed at least annually and identify any non-conformance to established agreements. The reviews should result in actions to address service-level conflicts or inconsistencies resulting from…

Providers shall assure reasonable information security across their information supply chain by performing an annual review. The review shall include all partners/third party-providers upon which their information supply chain depends on.

Third-party service providers shall demonstrate compliance with information security and confidentiality, access control, service definitions, and delivery level agreements included in third-party contracts. Third-party reports, records, and services shall undergo audit and review at least annually to govern and maintain compliance with the service delivery agreements.