- Find the media first: an honest sweep of where CUI actually rests on paper and portable storage usually surprises, and everything after depends on that answer.
- The cheapest safeguard is less media — the fewer places CUI exists outside managed systems, the less there is to store, track, and eventually destroy.
- Locked storage with a short list of people who can open it covers most small-business cases; the discipline is keeping the list and the habit current.
3.8.1OFFICIAL STATEMENT BELOWBASIC REQUIREMENTPENDING NIST SME REVIEW
3.8.1 — Media protection and storage
3.8 Media 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 (i.e., physically control and securely store) system media containing CUI, both paper and digital.
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
CUI on anything printed or portable — paper files, external drives, backup tapes — lives in physically controlled, secure storage rather than desk drawers and laptop bags. For media, the safeguard is physical custody, not a login screen.
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
- The written media-handling rule naming storage locations and responsible owners
- A media register — or a documented, defended position that CUI does not leave managed systems
- Dated periodic checks of the storage areas
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 |