56. Competent authorities should assess whether the institution has an effective framework in place …

Competent authorities should assess whether the institution has an effective framework in place for identifying, understanding, measuring and mitigating ICT change risk commensurate with the nature, scale and complexity of the institution’s activities and the ICT risk profile of the institution. The institution’s framework should cover the risks associated with the development, testing and approval of ICT systems changes, including the development or change of software, before they are migrated to the production environment and ensure an adequate ICT lifecycle management. For this assessment competent authorities should, in particular, take into account whether the framework considers:

• a. documented processes for managing and controlling changes to ICT systems (e.g. configuration and patch management) and data (e.g. bug fixing or data corrections), ensuring the adequate involvement of ICT risk management for important ICT changes that may significantly impact the institution’s risk profile or exposure;
• b. specifications regarding the required segregation of duties during the different phases of the implemented ICT change processes (e.g. solution design and development, testing and approval of new software and/or changes, migration and implementation in the production environment, and bug fixing), with a focus on the implemented solutions and segregation of duties to manage and control changes to the production ICT systems and data by ICT staff (e.g. developers, ICT system administrators, data base administrators) or any other party (e.g. business users, service providers);
• c. test environments that adequately reflect production environments;
• d. an asset inventory of the existing applications and ICT systems in the production environment, as well as the test and development environment, so that required changes (e.g. version updates or upgrades, systems patching, configuration changes) can be properly managed, implemented and monitored for the involved ICT systems.
• e. a process to monitor and manage the life cycle of the used ICT systems, to ensure that they continue to meet and support the actual business and risk management requirements and to make sure that the used ICT solutions and systems are still supported by their vendors; and that this is accompanied by adequate software development life cycle (SDLC) procedures.
• f. a software source code control system and appropriate procedures to prevent unauthorised changes in the source code of software that is developed in-house;
• g. a process to conduct a security and vulnerability screening of new or materially modified ICT systems and software, before releasing them into production and exposing them to possible cyber-attacks;
• h. a process and solutions to prevent the unauthorised or unintended disclosure of confidential data, when replacing, archiving, discarding or destroying ICT systems;
• i. an independent review and validation processes to reduce the risks for human errors when performing changes to the ICT systems that may have an important adverse effect on the availability, continuity or security of the institution (e.g. important changes to the firewall configuration), or security of the institution (e.g. changes to the firewalls).
• (d) Controls for managing material ICT data integrity risks

1. Overview

1.1 References

1.2 Identified Requirements

1.3 Related Standards

2. Identified Requirements

3. Related Standards

• EBA - Published by the European Banking Authority at https://www.eba.europa.eu/