- Include support infrastructure explicitly: telecom rooms, power and cooling for server spaces, exposed cable runs between areas.
- Choose monitoring proportionate to the facility — an alarmed server-room door can be worth more than cameras everywhere.
- Review the monitoring output on some cadence; an unwatched camera is decoration, and assessors ask who looks at it.
3.10.2OFFICIAL STATEMENT BELOWBASIC REQUIREMENTPENDING NIST SME REVIEW
3.10.2 — Facility protection and monitoring
3.10 Physical Protection · NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 2 · The heading label is this site's navigational shorthand; the official language is the statement below.
Official requirement statement (verbatim)
Protect and monitor the physical facility and support infrastructure for organizational systems.
NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 2 — Protecting CUI in Nonfederal Systems ↗NIST SP 800-171A — Assessing Security Requirements for CUI ↗Independent interpretation
What this requirement is after
The facility itself and what keeps it running — power, cooling, cabling, telecom — are protected and watched. Monitoring means something or someone notices intrusion or tampering: alarms, cameras, guards, or their practical small-facility equivalents.
Across revisions
Carried into Rev. 3 as 03.10.02 Monitoring Physical Access, with physical-access incident review made part of the requirement's scope.
Mapped practices
Brilliant at the Basics practices that support this requirement
No practice maps to this requirement — deliberately.
The campaign’s twenty practices are a priority list, not a control catalog, and none of them works this requirement’s substance directly. It still applies to you if it is in your contract’s scope: address it through your own implementation and the related artifacts below, and treat the absence of a mapping here as honesty, not permission to skip it.
Doing the work
Implementation considerations and evidence
- Coverage records for alarms and cameras against the areas that matter
- Maintenance and test records for the monitoring itself
- Sampled review of monitoring events and the retention applied to footage or alarm logs
Artifacts
Templates and worksheets with a mapped relationship
No artifact in the library names this requirement yet. The library index groups everything by category and practice.
The other revision
Where this lands in Rev. 3
Provenance
Sources and review status
| Primary sources | NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 2 — Protecting CUI in Nonfederal Systems · NIST SP 800-171A — Assessing Security Requirements for CUI |
|---|---|
| Review status | Pending NIST SME review |
| Content version | 1.0 |
| Updated |