What PR.IR-02 environmental threat protection asks for in NIST CSF 2.0
PR.IR-02 asks the organization to protect its technology assets against environmental threats, so that servers, network gear, storage and the supporting infrastructure keep working when the building around them is exposed to flooding, fire, wind, heat or humidity. It is a Subcategory of the Technology Infrastructure Resilience (PR.IR) Category in the PROTECT Function of CSF 2.0. It also absorbs part or all of CSF 1.1 PR.IP-5, so organizations that already assessed against 1.1 will find much of their prior environmental evidence carried into this outcome, though the wording and placement have changed. NIST's Implementation Examples for this Subcategory point to protecting equipment from floods, fire, wind and excessive heat and humidity, and to writing environmental protection and adequate operating infrastructure into requirements for service providers.
The risk is simple to state and hard to control. A flood, fire or cooling failure can take down systems faster than any cyber intrusion, and the cause is often outside the organization's hands. Many organizations run equipment in colocation facilities, leased office space or cloud regions where the landlord, colocation provider or cloud operator owns the building, the power, the cooling and the fire suppression. The organization may own the servers but not the room. In a gap analysis, this means the team must separate what it controls directly from what it inherits from a provider, and confirm that the provider's protections are documented, tested and matched to the organization's own impact assessment. Confirm which facilities host each critical system, which hazards apply to each site, and which provider reports or contract terms show how those hazards are handled.
For a customer questionnaire that asks about data center protection, a useful first step is to list every site and provider that hosts production data, then ask each for current evidence of environmental controls, such as third-party facility assessments, maintenance records for cooling and fire systems, and flood-zone and location risk analysis. Contract language should require environmental protection and minimum operating infrastructure, and it should give the organization the right to review evidence. Teams running their own rooms or hardware can use open-source monitoring to collect temperature, humidity and power signals and alert on thresholds. Grafana Alerting builds alert rules from queries across multiple data sources, which can bring facility sensor data together with system metrics. Confirm which sensor sources your facilities can export before you design those rules.
Which facilities, providers and systems fall under PR.IR-02
PR.IR-02 applies wherever technology assets run, including facilities the organization owns, rents or never sees. The scope question is less about the building and more about who controls the environmental protections and whether the organization can produce evidence for them.
In-house data rooms
Server rooms and small data centers the organization operates itself are the simplest case, because the organization controls every environmental safeguard. Scope them by the systems inside, not by the room's size. Check the location against flood maps, confirm fire suppression and cooling are in place and monitored, and confirm that equipment is not stored where water from pipes, roofs or floors can reach it. Document each safeguard as an asset-linked control so an assessor can trace it to the systems it protects.
Colocation cages
In a colocation facility, the organization usually owns the cage, racks and equipment, while the facility operator owns the building, power, cooling and fire systems. Scope the cage as in scope, then decide which environmental controls the operator provides and which the organization must verify. Ask the operator for current inspection records, fire suppression test results and humidity and temperature monitoring history, and confirm the contract gives the organization the right to receive them.
Cloud regions and availability zones
Cloud providers operate the physical environment, so PR.IR-02 is usually met through the provider's own controls and attestations. The organization's work is to choose regions with an understood hazard profile, deploy across zones where availability depends on it, and retain the provider's audit reports and shared responsibility documentation. Confirm which environmental controls the provider's independent reports cover and which parts are excluded from the organization's own review.
Edge sites and remote offices
Branch offices, retail locations, plants and field cabinets often host critical systems with little environmental protection. These sites are easy to miss in scoping because no one inventories their closets as data centers. Include every site that hosts a critical asset, record its local hazards such as heat, dust, water exposure or power instability, and set a verification step for installation and periodic checks by someone who is not the site's day-to-day user.
Third-party operators and managed services
Managed service providers and outsourced operators that run systems for the organization bring their facilities into scope through contract. PR.IR-02 includes requirements for service providers to maintain environmental protection and adequate operating infrastructure. Define those requirements in contracts, decide which the organization will review directly, and decide which it will accept through the provider's independent assessment reports. Note each decision in the supplier record so the scope is defensible.
Geography-driven hazard assessment
The hazards that apply depend on location. Coastal and river sites face flooding, exposed sites face wind, and hot or humid climates raise the risk of equipment overheating and condensation. Use the site's location to decide which hazards to assess, then tie each hazard to the facility's controls, such as elevation, drainage, cooling capacity or humidity limits. Repeat the assessment when a facility moves, when a region's hazard profile changes, or when a provider changes its location.
How an assessor tests environmental protection evidence
CSF 2.0 has no conformity assessment program, so testing PR.IR-02 happens against criteria your organization chooses. NIST states that it does not certify or endorse CSF implementations and has no plans for a conformity assessment program. In practice, a PR.IR-02 test is one of three things: an internal review by your own risk or audit function, a customer audit where a buyer checks your alignment to its requirements, or an independent assessor who tests against criteria both sides have agreed in writing. Before any of these starts, confirm which criteria apply and which environment is in scope, including any colocation facility or cloud region where your equipment sits. The assessor's conclusions will only be as useful as that written scope.
The NIST CSF 2.0 Reference Tool lists informative references for PR.IR-02 to SP 800-53 Rev. 5.2.0 controls in the contingency planning and physical and environmental protection families, including CP-2, PE-9 through PE-15, PE-18 and PE-23. It also lists ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Annex A controls 7.5 to 7.8 and 7.11 to 7.14. These references are pointers to related material, not proof that meeting one framework satisfies another. Confirm each mapping against the NIST CSF 2.0 Reference Tool export and check it against the exact control wording in the standard you are using before you cite it to an assessor or customer.
When an assessor tests this area, expect to ask for evidence that the environmental hazards for each site were identified, that protections such as fire suppression, power conditioning, cooling and flood controls are installed and inspected, and that monitoring alerts when temperature, humidity or power drifts outside tolerance. Ask for maintenance records, test results for suppression and generator systems, and documented responses to past events. For self-hosted platforms, your metrics stack can supply part of this evidence. Prometheus collects metrics over HTTP and stores them as time series, and Grafana Alerting can route alerts on those readings, so the alert history becomes evidence of detection and response. Confirm the sensor feeds and retention settings with your facilities team before relying on them.
What assessors ask for and where findings usually come from
This table compares, for each environmental area, what an assessor typically requests, the evidence that shows the control operating, and the gaps that most often turn into findings. Read it as a pre-assessment checklist: each finding usually traces back to a record that is missing, out of date, or not tied to a specific facility or provider.
| Area | Evidence requested | Common findings |
|---|---|---|
| Facility hazard assessment | Documented site hazard assessment covering flood, fire, wind, heat and humidity, with the date it was last reviewed and who approved it | Assessment predates a facility change or new room, or does not name the hazards the site actually faces |
| Equipment placement | Floor plans or rack layouts showing where systems sit relative to known hazards such as low ground, water lines and exterior walls | Layouts are out of date, so newly added equipment cannot be tied to a placement decision |
| Fire suppression and detection | Inspection and maintenance records for detectors and suppression systems, plus the most recent service report | Service records are missing for some zones, or inspection dates lapse without an explanation |
| Flood and water controls | Records of water detection, sump or drainage checks, and any leak incident tickets with their resolution | Water sensors are not tested on a documented schedule, or alerts are not routed to a responder |
| Cooling and humidity monitoring | Sensor configuration, threshold settings, and sample alert history showing who responded and when | Thresholds are unchanged since installation, or temperature and humidity logs have gaps during the review period |
| Provider requirements | Contracts or service terms stating environmental protection and operating infrastructure requirements, plus the provider's current evidence | Contracts omit environmental terms, or the provider's most recent facility report is older than the contract review cycle |
How to implement PR.IR-02 in six steps
This sequence moves from knowing where technology runs to proving that the facilities and providers hosting it are protected against environmental threats, with each step producing a record an assessor can test.
Identify hosting locations and hazards
Start by listing every place technology assets run, including owned data centers, colocation cubicles, office server rooms, cloud regions, edge sites and any air-gapped enclosures. For each location, record the environmental hazards that apply, such as flooding, fire, wind, excessive heat and humidity, and note the source of each hazard (site survey, building records, regional hazard data or provider documentation). The output is a hazard register tied to named locations, owned by facilities or infrastructure leadership. The step is complete when every location in the asset inventory appears in the register and each entry has a hazard rating and a named owner.
Map equipment to hazards
Using the asset inventory from the Identify Function, link each system, rack, network device and storage array to the location and hazards that could affect it. Flag equipment that supports critical services or has no alternate site, because these items need the strongest protection. Infrastructure engineers usually do this work with input from the business owners of each service. The output is an equipment-to-hazard map that shows which assets sit in flood-prone rooms, under sprinkler or suppression systems, near heat-generating equipment, or in buildings exposed to wind. The step is complete when the map covers all critical services and the owners have confirmed the mappings.
Define environmental requirements and thresholds
Write the facility control baseline for each location class: the protections expected against each hazard, the operating ranges for temperature and humidity, the detection and suppression approach for fire, and the measures used against water intrusion. Where equipment vendors publish operating ranges, record them as the threshold source and confirm them against the hardware in use. The owner of this baseline is usually the facilities or data center manager, reviewed by security and resilience leads. The output is a facility control baseline document, approved by the accountable executive, that sets a measurable threshold for each control and an alert level below the failure point.
Implement or verify controls
Compare each location against the baseline and close the gaps. Work may include sealing and elevating equipment above known flood levels, installing or testing fire detection and suppression, adding cooling or humidity control, securing equipment against wind-borne debris and verifying power and cooling dependencies. Where a location is run by a colocation or cloud provider, request the provider's evidence rather than assuming it. Engineers or a partner prepare the changes, and the organization accepts residual risk in writing. The output is a gap list with closure records, such as inspection reports, maintenance certificates, commissioning tests and photographs of installed controls. The step is complete when each gap is closed, accepted or assigned to a dated remediation item.
Add monitoring and alerting
Instrument the thresholds from the baseline so that conditions are measured continuously and deviations reach a person who can act. Environmental sensors, building management system points and power or cooling metrics can feed a time series store such as Prometheus, with dashboards and alert rules in Grafana Alerting, which can combine metrics and logs from several sources in one view. Define who receives each alert, how it escalates and how an incident is opened. Confirm which sensor and data source integrations your hardware supports before committing to a design. The output is a set of tested alert rules, a documented escalation path and a record of at least one alert test showing that the notification reached the right people.
Extend requirements into provider contracts
Where a colocation facility, managed hosting provider, cloud region or managed service runs systems for the organization, add environmental protection and adequate operating infrastructure to the contract or service requirements. The clause should name the hazards covered, the evidence the provider must supply (such as facility audit reports, inspection records and capacity or environmental monitoring summaries), the notification duty when conditions deviate and the right to review the evidence. Procurement and legal teams own the contract wording, and the security team reviews it against the baseline. The output is a provider requirements clause and an evidence schedule, with a check that each in-scope provider has supplied current evidence before the contract is renewed.
Evidence that satisfies PR.IR-02 and how to keep it current
PR.IR-02 is tested by what an assessor can see: the hazards you identified, the controls you chose, and the records showing those controls worked. The six artifacts below connect those layers, and each one goes stale on its own schedule, so refresh them separately rather than all at once before an assessment.
Facility hazard assessment
This document records which environmental threats apply to each site or data hall, such as flooding, fire, wind, and excessive heat and humidity, and how likely and severe each one is for that location. An assessor will check whether the hazards listed match the sites in scope and whether the assessment reflects current conditions like drainage changes, new neighbors, or altered building layouts. Review it after any facility change and at least once a year, and record who approved each revision.
Environmental control inventory
List every control that protects equipment from environmental threats: raised floors or flood barriers, fire suppression, cooling units, humidity controls, and seismic or wind bracing where relevant. Each entry should name the asset it protects, the location, the owner, and the model or version. Assessors often find gaps where new racks or cooling units were added without updating the list, so reconcile this inventory against asset records during each review.
Sensor and threshold configuration
Export the configuration for temperature, humidity, water leak, smoke and power sensors, including the thresholds that trigger alerts and the notification routes. Prometheus collects metrics through a pull model and Grafana Alerting builds alert rules across multiple data sources, so exported rule files and dashboards can show exactly what is monitored. Confirm the thresholds match the manufacturer and facility guidance you adopted, and keep dated copies of changes.
Alert history and response records
Retain the alerts raised by environmental sensors along with the acknowledgment time, the responder, the action taken and the closure note. Grafana Alerting can act as the single view for these events, but the audit value comes from the tickets showing a person responded. Check that alerts are not silently muted or left unresolved, and sample several events per period to confirm the response matched the documented procedure.
Fire and cooling maintenance logs
Keep inspection, testing and service records for fire detection and suppression systems, cooling units, and humidity equipment. Each entry should show the date, the technician or vendor, the work performed, any defects found, and the follow-up. Assessors commonly ask for evidence that maintenance happened on schedule and that defects were fixed, so compare the log against the maintenance calendar and flag any overdue items before the test.
Provider environmental clauses and attestations
When a service provider hosts or operates systems for you, collect the contract clauses that require environmental protection and adequate operating infrastructure, along with any independent reports the provider can supply. NIST's Implementation Examples for PR.IR-02 call for these requirements explicitly. Ask the provider for current evidence annually, check that the clauses still match the services in use, and record what you could not verify and why.
Using open-source monitoring to show environmental conditions are watched
Monitoring is the evidence that turns an environmental control from a building feature into something an assessor can test. For PR.IR-02, the question is whether the organization can show that conditions such as temperature, humidity, water presence and power state in server rooms are measured continuously and that someone is alerted when they drift. Prometheus (Apache-2.0) can serve that role. It collects metrics from instrumented jobs through a pull model over HTTP, stores them as time series identified by metric name and labels, and retains them on local storage that the operator configures. Environmental readings are not collected natively by Prometheus, so the first decision is which sensors feed it. Confirm that an exporter or gateway exists for each sensor family in your facilities, whether that is a building management system, a PDU or a dedicated environmental probe, and that its readings carry labels for site, room and rack so an assessor can trace a value to a physical location.
Grafana Alerting (AGPL-3.0-only) sits on top of that data and builds alert rules from queries and expressions across multiple data sources. This matters for environmental threats because a flood sensor alert, a cooling failure and a generator or UPS event often appear in different systems. Grafana can evaluate them together and let the team create, manage and act on alerts from a single view. Record who owns each rule, who receives the notification, and what the expected response is, since an alert that reaches nobody is weak evidence. Also confirm how long alert history is kept. Retention is a configuration choice in your deployment rather than a default you can assume, and it should match the look-back period your own assessor is likely to request.
Before relying on this stack as evidence, check the licensing and operating terms with your legal team, because AGPL-3.0-only carries obligations if the software is modified and offered to users over a network. Run a short test: simulate a threshold breach in a non-production room, confirm the alert fires, confirm the notification reaches the named owner, and keep the rule definition, the alert record and the response ticket together. That set of artifacts, rather than the dashboard itself, is what shows that environmental conditions are watched and acted on.
What meeting PR.IR-02 costs in money and effort
This table lists the cost components of protecting technology assets from environmental threats under PR.IR-02, who is paid for each, whether it is one-time or recurring, and what moves it up or down. No figures are given because none were supplied, so use the table to structure a request for quote and ask for each line to be priced separately.
| Cost component | Who is paid or who spends | One-time or recurring | What drives it up or down |
|---|---|---|---|
| Facility upgrades (flood barriers, fire suppression, cooling, humidity control) | Facilities contractors, building owner or colocation provider | One-time, with later maintenance | Site risk assessment results, age of the room, whether the site is owned or leased, and whether upgrades are shared with other tenants |
| Colocation or data center fees | Colocation provider | Recurring | Rack count, power and cooling allocation, contract term, and whether the provider already documents environmental controls you can rely on |
| Sensor and monitoring tooling (temperature, humidity, water leak, smoke and power alerts) | Hardware vendors for sensors, or open-source tooling such as Prometheus and Grafana with internal or contracted engineering | One-time for sensors, recurring for hosting, storage and upkeep | Number of rooms and sites, alert thresholds, retention period for readings, and whether sensor data feeds existing monitoring (DE.CM) |
| Open-source tooling licenses | No license fee for the open-source components themselves | Not applicable for license; recurring for hosting and support if bought | Open source removes license spend, not engineering time to deploy, tune and maintain alert rules |
| Engineering and facilities staff time | Internal platform, facilities and security staff, or an implementation partner under a written scope | One-time for design and build, recurring for alert response and testing | Number of sites, how many environmental systems are already instrumented, and how much integration with existing change control is required |
| Evidence upkeep (maintenance logs, inspection records, alert history, test results) | Internal compliance or operations staff | Recurring | How often equipment is inspected, whether records are kept in a system that exports cleanly, and how many periods an assessor will sample |
| External review or testing of physical and environmental controls | Independent assessor, facilities consultant or specialist engineer | Recurring, often annual or on change | Scope of sites, depth of the review, and whether the review is a readiness check or part of a formal assessment |
| Service provider requirements (contract clauses, provider evidence) | Legal, procurement and the provider's own staff | One-time for contract terms, recurring for provider reports | Number of providers that run systems for you, and whether their environmental controls are documented in a form you can review |
| Auditor sampling and assessment support | Independent auditor or certification body, and internal staff who produce samples | Recurring with each assessment cycle | Number of sites in scope, number of environmental events and maintenance tickets sampled, and how quickly records can be produced |
Who owns PR.IR-02 in-house, with a partner and with the auditor
Your organization owns PR.IR-02. The Subcategory asks that technology assets be protected against environmental threats, and that protection depends on facilities decisions only your organization can make: where equipment sits, how the site is maintained, which hazards are accepted and which are mitigated. Your team also owns the relationships with landlords, colocation operators and data center providers, and it signs the risk acceptance when a hazard cannot be fully addressed. No partner or auditor can make those choices for you.
- Facilities decisions: Choose room locations, raised floors, drainage, fire suppression and cooling design, and record the reasons.
- Provider relationships: Hold the contracts and service reports from landlords, colocation and cloud providers that cover environmental controls.
- Risk acceptance: Decide which environmental risks are accepted, who signs, and when the decision is reviewed.
- Operations: Run inspections, maintenance and incident response for environmental alarms.
- Final sign-off: Approve the evidence pack before it goes to an assessor.
Check that each of these duties has a named owner and that the owner can produce the records without help from a partner.
An implementation partner prepares the systems and evidence that show PR.IR-02 is working. Under a fixed scope, a partner can configure environmental monitoring, document hazards for each room, draft contract clauses that require providers to maintain adequate environmental protection, and assemble evidence packs. The partner does not own the control and does not decide whether the control passes. Its output is material for your team to review and for an assessor to test.
- Monitoring setup: Configure sensors and alert rules for temperature, humidity and power or water alarms where your environment supports them.
- Hazard documentation: Write site hazard records covering flooding, fire, wind and heat exposure for each location.
- Provider clause language: Draft the terms that service providers must meet for environmental protection and operating infrastructure, for your legal team to adapt.
- Evidence packs: Collect alert history, configuration exports and maintenance records into a structured package.
- Handover: Document how the monitoring and runbooks operate after the engagement ends.
Confirm in the statement of work that the partner will not issue findings, attest to compliance or act as your assessor.
An independent auditor, assessor or certification body tests whether PR.IR-02 is in place and operating, then reports its own conclusion. Only that party issues a report or certificate. NIST does not offer certifications for CSF implementations, so any formal conclusion about CSF alignment comes from an assessor you engage separately, and the scope of that assessor's work should be agreed in writing before fieldwork begins. The assessor samples evidence, inspects facilities where possible and interviews staff.
- Independence: The assessor must not have designed or operated the controls it tests.
- Sampling: Expect the assessor to select sites, time periods and alerts of its own choosing.
- Inspection: Expect site visits or remote evidence review, depending on the scope.
- Reporting: The assessor writes findings and conclusions under its own name.
- Limits: A partner's readiness work does not count as the assessment.
Ask the assessor how it will treat evidence prepared by a partner, and confirm the assessor's independence before engagement.
Where organizations fall short on environmental protection
PR.IR-02 asks whether technology assets are protected from environmental threats, but many programs have sensors and facility contracts without a clear picture of which hazards matter or who acts when conditions drift. The gaps below recur across on-premises rooms, colocation sites and cloud regions, and each one has a specific closing action.
No current hazard register
Teams often protect server rooms against fire and water without a written list of which sites face flooding, wind, heat or humidity risk, and which systems sit in them. Without that register, PR.IR-02 cannot be scoped, and protection decisions rest on habit. The closing action is a register that lists each facility or hosting location, the hazards that apply to it, the assets it houses and the owner who reviews it on a set cycle. Check that the register links to the asset inventory maintained under ID.AM.
Sensors without thresholds or owners
Temperature, humidity and water sensors are often installed, yet nobody has set the alert thresholds or named the person who responds when a reading crosses them. An alert that fires into a shared mailbox is effectively unmonitored. Assign each sensor class a threshold, an escalation path and an owner, then test one alert end to end. Grafana Alerting can route rules built from sensor metrics and logs into a single view, but the thresholds and owners must still be defined by the organization.
Provider facility evidence never collected
Colocation and managed hosting providers often run the cooling, fire suppression and flood defenses that protect the organization's hardware, but the customer has never requested evidence of them. PR.IR-02 includes requirements for service providers to maintain environmental protection and adequate operating infrastructure, so these controls belong in contracts and due diligence. Request current facility inspection records, fire suppression test records and environmental monitoring summaries, and record the date each was received and reviewed.
Maintenance records scattered
Evidence that cooling units, uninterruptible power supplies and fire systems were serviced often sits with facilities staff, vendor portals and email threads, so an assessor asking for it receives a different answer from each source. Consolidate maintenance schedules, service reports and corrective actions into one controlled repository with consistent asset identifiers. Confirm with each vendor which records they retain and for how long, since the organization must be able to produce them on request.
Cloud region reliance assumed
Teams that run workloads in a cloud provider often assume the provider's regions are safe from flood, fire, wind and heat, without reading the provider's documentation on region design or noting which regions the workloads actually use. Review which regions and availability zones host each critical system, what the provider publishes about facility protection for them, and whether the organization's own recovery plan depends on a single location. Record the review in the same register as on-premises sites.
PR.IR-02 questions buyers ask before hiring help
Does NIST CSF 2.0 have a certification for PR.IR-02?
No. NIST does not offer certifications or endorsements of CSF-related products, implementations or services, and it has no plans for a conformity assessment program. Your organization can show alignment with PR.IR-02 through its own assessment, and an independent assessor can review that work if you want outside testing. Only an independent auditor or assessor issues a report on your environment, and an implementation partner such as DeployOpen prepares the systems, controls and evidence for that review. Be cautious of any provider that offers a CSF certificate, since no such certificate exists from NIST.
Can we handle PR.IR-02 environmental protection ourselves?
Often yes, if your facilities team already owns the physical environment and can show how it is managed. The outcome asks that technology assets are protected from environmental threats such as flooding, fire, wind, heat and humidity. Internal teams usually need to map those threats to the sites and rooms that hold your equipment, confirm the protections in place, and keep records that show they work. Outside help tends to make sense when the inventory of locations is incomplete, when cloud or colocation providers hold part of the infrastructure, or when no one owns the evidence trail. Your organization keeps ownership of the controls either way.
How long does PR.IR-02 readiness usually take?
The duration depends mostly on how well your site and asset records are maintained, and no fixed timeline applies to every organization. Work runs faster when you already have a current list of data centers, server rooms and equipment locations, along with facility documentation. It runs slower when sites are spread across regions, when environmental monitoring is inconsistent, or when provider contracts need updating. Ask any provider to break its plan into phases such as discovery, gap review, remediation and evidence collection, and to state which phases depend on your facilities or provider teams. Treat any single number offered without that breakdown with caution.
What do facilities and hosting providers need to provide?
Facilities and hosting teams need to supply the records that show how each location is protected and who maintains those protections. Typical inputs include site lists, building and room layouts, fire suppression and detection records, flood and wind exposure assessments, cooling and humidity controls, and maintenance logs. For hosted or colocated systems, you also need the provider's own environmental controls and evidence of how they are checked. Ask the team to confirm which controls they operate and which you rely on them for, since a gap in either place becomes a gap in your PR.IR-02 position. An implementation partner can organize these inputs, but the facilities team must confirm them.
What does PR.IR-02 expect from our service providers?
PR.IR-02 includes requirements for service providers that run systems for you, so your contracts should require adequate environmental protection and operating infrastructure. In practice, that means your provider must describe how its facilities handle the threats named in the outcome and must share evidence on request. Write these expectations into the contract rather than relying on general security language. Your own team still owns the control objective, so you should review the provider's evidence on a schedule rather than accepting a single document at signing. This is a shared responsibility question, and the contract is where it becomes testable.
What should we confirm in a provider contract for PR.IR-02?
Confirm the scope of the engagement, the deliverables, the timeline and the responsibilities of each party in writing before work begins. Most DeployOpen engagements are fixed-scope, so the agreed scope, deliverables and timelines should appear in the signed document. For environmental protection specifically, ask who owns each control, what evidence you will receive and how often, how changes to sites or providers are reported, and who pays for remediation. Also confirm whether ongoing support, upgrades or testing are covered by a retainer. Finally, make sure the contract states that the provider prepares evidence but does not issue audit reports or certifications.
How much does PR.IR-02 readiness work cost?
Cost depends on the number of sites, the state of your documentation, how much remediation is needed and whether ongoing support is included. A provider quote follows from a written scope, and DeployOpen does not publish a price list. Expect one-time costs for discovery, gap review, remediation and evidence setup, plus recurring costs for monitoring, reviews and any retainer. Ask each provider to separate those items, to name who is paid for each task, and to state which assumptions about your sites would change the price. Any figure presented without a defined scope is not a reliable basis for comparison.
Which monitoring tools help show PR.IR-02 evidence over time?
Monitoring platforms can collect environmental and infrastructure signals so you can show that protections were checked over time. Prometheus collects metrics from instrumented jobs through a pull model over HTTP and stores them as time series, and Grafana Alerting builds alert rules from queries across multiple data sources. Together they can alert on metrics and logs from one view, which helps teams act on warnings such as rising temperature or humidity readings if those values are exported from your sensors or building systems. Confirm that your sensor feeds can reach these tools, since the platforms do not sense the environment themselves and the evidence is only as complete as the data you send.
When bringing in a partner for PR.IR-02 makes sense
Bring in a partner when your team cannot cover the environmental work for PR.IR-02 without pulling people from other priorities, or when the facilities that house your technology assets are run by someone outside your team. PR.IR-02 asks that technology assets be protected against flooding, fire, wind, and excessive heat and humidity, and much of the evidence sits with facilities staff, colocation providers and building managers rather than with the security or platform team. Check first who holds the keys, the access logs and the environmental monitoring records for each room or site in scope. If the answer is several outside parties and no single internal owner, a partner can help you map those dependencies and assemble a consistent set of records before anyone outside your organization asks for them.
The second trigger is the evidence pack itself. Before an independent assessor or auditor tests the environmental controls, you need a clear statement of what each control is, who operates it, how it is configured, and what records show it working over time. In a self-hosted environment, that can include monitoring configuration exported from your own tooling, alert rules and their notification history, and documented procedures for responding to a threshold breach. DeployOpen prepares systems, controls and evidence in this way, within your infrastructure and under a written scope. It does not issue audit reports, attestations or certifications. Only an independent auditor, assessor or certification body can do that, so agree with your assessor early which artifacts they will accept and how they want them organized.
Before engaging anyone, confirm three things in writing: which sites and facility providers fall inside the scope, which outside parties must contribute evidence and under what contract terms, and who inside your organization will own each control after the work ends. Ask a prospective partner to show how they would document dependencies on facility providers and how they would keep that documentation current. A fixed-scope agreement makes these boundaries explicit before work starts, and the boundaries matter more than the headline effort estimate. Any partner should be able to state clearly which parts they will perform and which parts remain your responsibility or your assessor's.
How DeployOpen scopes and prepares PR.IR-02 evidence
This sequence turns a facility and provider inventory into a written scope, monitoring that tracks environmental conditions, and an evidence pack the organization can hand to its own assessor. The organization keeps ownership of its controls and decisions throughout.
Agree the scope in writing
DeployOpen and the organization agree a fixed scope before work starts. The scope names the in-scope sites, data centers, rooms, network closets and hosted environments, the self-hosted platforms that run in them, and any service providers that operate systems for the organization. Deliverables and timelines are written into the agreement. The sequence is complete when the organization's security and facilities owners have signed off the scope document.
Inventory facilities and provider dependencies
The team gathers the physical and hosting facts that PR.IR-02 depends on: where equipment sits, which flood, fire, wind and heat exposures apply to each location, and which cooling, power and fire suppression systems support it. For provider-hosted systems, the team records who operates the facility and what environmental controls that provider documents. The output is a facility register that the organization's facilities team confirms against its own records.
Map hazards to monitored signals
For each hazard in the register, the team identifies the signals that would show it is developing, such as temperature and humidity readings, water detection, smoke or fire panel status and facility power state. It then records which of these can be collected by the organization's own monitoring stack, and which must come from building management systems or provider reports. Gaps are logged as open items for the organization to resolve. The step closes with a hazard-to-signal matrix approved by the facilities owner.
Deploy self-hosted metrics and alerting
Within the organization's own infrastructure, the team configures a metrics collector such as Prometheus, which gathers metrics from instrumented jobs over HTTP and stores them as time series, and Grafana Alerting, which builds alert rules from queries across multiple data sources. Alert routes are set to the people named in the scope. The step is verified by triggering test conditions in a non-production setting and recording that the alerts reached the right responders.
Document response and recovery runbooks
The team writes runbooks that link each alert to the actions a facilities or operations person takes, such as shutting down non-critical loads, moving workloads, or invoking the provider's escalation path. Runbooks state who decides, how the decision is recorded, and where the organization's continuity plan is referenced. The step closes when the organization's owners confirm that each runbook matches how their facility actually operates.
Draft provider requirements
Where a service provider runs systems for the organization, DeployOpen drafts environmental protection and operating infrastructure requirements for the contract or service schedule, covering the hazards and conditions identified earlier. Legal and procurement review the language before it is issued. The organization decides which requirements to impose and how providers evidence them. The output is a draft requirements annex and a list of evidence the provider must supply.
Assemble the evidence pack
The team compiles the artifacts that show the controls exist and operate: the scope document, facility register, hazard-to-signal matrix, monitoring configuration exports, alert test records, runbooks, and provider evidence received to date. Each item is indexed to the relevant PR.IR-02 Subcategory and the referenced informative references. The pack is complete when the organization's control owner has reviewed it and confirmed that it is accurate.
Hand over to an independent assessor
The organization gives the evidence pack to an independent auditor, assessor or certification body of its choosing. DeployOpen answers technical questions about the implementation but does not issue audit reports, attestations or certifications. Any assessment conclusion comes from that independent party. The sequence ends when the assessor has received the pack and the organization has a record of open questions and who owns each one.
