- Fold this into rhythms that already exist — patch cycles, vendor service schedules, hardware refresh plans — rather than inventing a parallel maintenance program.
- Keep maintenance records with what was done, by whom, and when; every other requirement in this family quietly assumes those records exist.
3.7.1OFFICIAL STATEMENT BELOWBASIC REQUIREMENTPENDING NIST SME REVIEW
3.7.1 — System maintenance
3.7 Maintenance · 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)
Perform maintenance on 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
Systems are maintained — patched, serviced, repaired — deliberately and on a schedule, not when something finally breaks. The least prescriptive requirement in Rev. 2: assessors read it through the records showing that maintenance happens and someone owns it.
Across revisions
No Rev. 3 counterpart: the slot (03.07.01) is marked withdrawn, and the routine perform-maintenance expectation was recategorized as ordinary operational activity rather than carried forward as a security requirement. The specific maintenance safeguards live on in 03.07.04 through 03.07.06.
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
- Maintenance schedules and completion records for in-scope systems
- Vendor service reports retained with the system's history
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
No direct Rev. 3 counterpart — see the transition crosswalk for where this requirement's substance went. Open the transition crosswalk →
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 |