- One policy set following the catalog's family structure is easier to maintain and assess than dozens of freestanding documents; procedures belong closest to the teams that execute them.
- Write policy to match what the organization actually does — an aspirational policy that operations contradicts reads worse in an assessment than a modest one that is true.
- Set the review frequency, put it on a calendar, and name an owner; the review-and-update half of this requirement is the part that silently lapses.
03.15.01OFFICIAL TITLEPENDING NIST SME REVIEW
03.15.01 — Policy and Procedures
03.15 Planning · NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 3
Independent summary of the official requirement
Develop, document, and disseminate to designated personnel or roles the policies and procedures needed to satisfy the security requirements for protecting CUI, and review and update them at organization-defined frequencies.
Rev. 3 requirement text is multi-part and parameterized with organization-defined values, so this site summarizes rather than reproduces it. The summary is independent — read the official publication for the binding wording.
NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 3 — Protecting CUI in Nonfederal Systems ↗NIST SP 800-171A Rev. 3 — Assessing Security Requirements for CUI ↗Independent interpretation
What this requirement is after
Rev. 2 assumed policies existed; Rev. 3 asks for them. Every family in this catalog now expects a written statement of what the organization requires and a procedure for how it happens, reviewed on a cadence — because implementations drift, and an implementation nobody wrote down cannot be handed to the next person or checked by anyone.
Across revisions
New as a standalone requirement — Rev. 2 contained no explicit policy requirement, leaving governance documentation implied. Rev. 3 makes it assessable in its own right.
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 policy and procedure set with version history and dissemination records
- Dated review records showing the defined frequency is honored
Suggested owners, derived from the mapped practices and artifacts: IT leader. Ownership is a named person in your organization, not a role on a website.
Artifacts
Templates and worksheets with a mapped relationship
The other revision
Where this came from in Rev. 2
No direct Rev. 2 counterpart — this requirement is new in Rev. 3. Open the transition crosswalk →
Provenance
Sources and review status
| Primary sources | NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 3 — Protecting CUI in Nonfederal Systems · NIST SP 800-171A Rev. 3 — Assessing Security Requirements for CUI |
|---|---|
| Review status | Pending NIST SME review |
| Content version | 1.0 |
| Updated |