PR.IR-03: Mechanisms are implemented to achieve resilience requirements in normal and adverse situations

PR.IR-03 requires you to put concrete, testable mechanisms in place so your cybersecurity services and critical business processes keep working in normal conditions and continue (or recover fast) under adverse conditions. Operationalize it by defining resilience requirements, mapping them to systems and third parties, implementing technical and procedural controls, and retaining evidence from testing, monitoring, and incident learnings. ¹

Key takeaways:

• Define resilience requirements first (availability, recoverability, integrity, and operational continuity) and tie each to a control and owner.
• Implement mechanisms that work in both “day-to-day” and “bad day” scenarios (failover, backups, segmentation, runbooks, crisis communications).
• Prove operation with recurring evidence: tests, monitoring, change records, incident postmortems, and risk acceptances. ¹

The pr.ir-03: mechanisms are implemented to achieve resilience requirements in normal and adverse situations requirement is where resilience stops being a strategy slide and becomes engineering and operations. Auditors and regulators rarely accept “we’re resilient” as a narrative; they want to see that you defined what resilience means for your environment, implemented mechanisms that meet those requirements, and can demonstrate the mechanisms work under stress.

For a CCO, GRC lead, or security compliance owner, the fastest path is to treat PR.IR-03 as a control family that connects business impact analysis (what must stay up), architecture (how it stays up), and response/recovery operations (how you keep serving customers during an incident). The requirement applies whether you are cloud-native, hybrid, or on-prem, and it extends to third parties that provide material services (hosting, identity, payments, support platforms, managed security).

This page gives requirement-level implementation guidance: who owns what, what mechanisms qualify, what evidence you should retain, and the exam questions that usually cause findings. It is aligned to NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 language and expectations. ¹

Regulatory text

Excerpt: “Mechanisms are implemented to achieve resilience requirements in normal and adverse situations.” ¹

What the operator must do:
You must (1) define resilience requirements for the services that matter, (2) implement mechanisms that meet those requirements during routine operations and during adverse events (for example, cyber incidents, infrastructure failures, third-party outages), and (3) demonstrate through testing and operational evidence that the mechanisms work as designed. ¹

NIST CSF 2.0 also provides the framing and mapping context for CSF categories and outcomes; use it to anchor your control language and crosswalks for internal governance and assessment work. ²

Plain-English interpretation (what PR.IR-03 means)

PR.IR-03 means you do not rely on hope, heroics, or ad hoc recovery. You set resilience targets (for example, maximum tolerable downtime for a customer-facing service, or recovery expectations for a critical dataset), then you build and run mechanisms that consistently hit those targets in two modes:

• Normal operations: predictable load, routine changes, and standard failure rates.
• Adverse situations: ransomware, destructive attacks, regional cloud failures, key third-party outages, bad deployments, credential compromise, and similar stress conditions.

“Mechanisms” can be technical (redundancy, backups, immutable logs) and operational (on-call, runbooks, incident communications). Your job is to make them intentional, owned, tested, and evidenced. ¹

Who it applies to (entity + operational context)

Applies to: Any organization running a cybersecurity program that uses NIST CSF 2.0 as a framework reference, including regulated and non-regulated entities adopting CSF for governance. ¹

Operational context where PR.IR-03 is typically examined:

• Customer-facing systems: portals, APIs, e-commerce, payments, and support channels.
• Identity and access: SSO/IdP, privileged access tooling, directory services.
• Core infrastructure: cloud accounts/subscriptions, network, DNS, email, endpoint management.
• Data services: databases, storage, key management, backup platforms.
• Material third parties: cloud providers, SaaS platforms, MSP/MSSP, payment processors, and critical data processors.

If a third party’s failure can break your resilience requirements, PR.IR-03 effectively forces you to manage that dependency through architecture choices, contract requirements, and contingency plans. ¹

What you actually need to do (step-by-step)

1) Define resilience requirements in business terms

Create a short “Resilience Requirements Register” that covers:

• Critical services/processes (what must remain available or recoverable)
• Impact tolerance (how long you can be down, how much data loss is tolerable, what functions must degrade gracefully)
• Dependencies (systems, teams, facilities, third parties)
• Measurement method (what telemetry or test proves compliance)

Keep this bounded. Start with the services that would trigger customer harm, safety issues, financial misstatement, contractual breach, or regulatory notification. ¹

2) Map requirements to concrete mechanisms

For each service, identify and document mechanisms across these buckets:

• Architecture & redundancy: multi-zone or multi-region design where justified; elimination of single points of failure.
• Backups & restoration: backup frequency, protection, restore workflow, and restoration verification.
• Security containment: segmentation, least privilege, and isolation patterns that limit blast radius.
• Operational readiness: runbooks, on-call, escalation paths, and “break glass” access with logging.
• Monitoring & alerting: health checks tied to user experience and critical dependencies, not just infrastructure metrics.
• Third-party contingencies: alternative providers where feasible, manual workarounds, contract SLAs/notification duties, and exit/portability considerations.

Document the linkage: requirement → mechanism(s) → owner → evidence. This is the shortest route to auditability. ¹

3) Assign accountable owners and decision rights

Resilience fails when “everyone owns it.” Set:

• Service owner accountable for meeting resilience targets.
• Platform/infrastructure owner accountable for shared mechanisms (backup platform, logging, CI/CD).
• GRC owner accountable for the register, evidence calendar, and exception handling.
• Third-party risk owner accountable for resilience commitments and contingency planning for material third parties.

Define who can accept risk when a requirement is not met and what compensating controls are required. ¹

4) Build and test in normal and adverse modes

Testing is the proof point for PR.IR-03. Your testing program should include:

• Recovery tests: restore data and services using documented procedures.
• Failover tests: validate that redundancy works and that routing/auth/session handling behaves correctly.
• Tabletop exercises: validate decision-making, communications, and escalation for adverse cyber scenarios.
• Change validation: ensure major changes (architecture, IAM, network, backup policies) include resilience validation steps.

Capture outcomes and remediation tasks in your issue tracker with owners and due dates. A test without tracked remediation is weak evidence. ¹

5) Operationalize monitoring and continuous assurance

Resilience mechanisms degrade quietly (expired certificates, drifted firewall rules, backup failures). Implement:

• Control health monitoring: backup job success/failure, replication lag, privileged access integrity signals.
• Service-level monitoring: user-impact metrics and dependency checks.
• Evidence automation: recurring exports or screenshots are fragile; prefer system-generated reports and tickets.

This is where Daydream fits naturally: map PR.IR-03 to policies, procedures, control owners, and recurring evidence collection so you are not rebuilding proof each audit cycle. ¹

6) Govern exceptions and document rationale

You will have gaps. Handle them with:

• documented exception request,
• risk assessment and compensating controls,
• explicit approval,
• review cadence,
• closure criteria.

Auditors tolerate risk decisions; they do not tolerate undocumented ones. ¹

Required evidence and artifacts to retain

Use an evidence checklist so collection is consistent:

Governance

• Resilience Requirements Register (service list, targets, dependencies, owners)
• Policies/standards referencing resilience mechanisms (backup, DR, logging, incident response)
• Risk acceptances and exceptions with approvals ¹

Design & implementation

• Architecture diagrams showing redundancy/segmentation
• Backup configurations and retention settings
• Runbooks for failover/restore and incident workflows
• Third-party contracts/SLAs and notification clauses for material providers ¹

Operational proof

• Backup success reports and restore verification results
• Failover test records and outcomes
• Tabletop exercise reports and action items
• Incident postmortems that map learnings to control improvements
• Monitoring dashboards or exported reports showing control health ¹

Common exam/audit questions and hangups

Typical questions

• “Show me your resilience requirements. Who approved them and how are they measured?”
• “Which systems are in scope for resilience testing, and why?”
• “Prove your backups restore. Show the last restore test and remediation.”
• “How do you ensure resilience when a critical third party is down?”
• “What happens if IAM is degraded? How do you authenticate and administer systems?” ¹

Hangups that trigger findings

• Targets exist but are not mapped to mechanisms.
• Mechanisms exist but are not tested (or tests are not retained).
• DR plans are generic and not service-specific.
• Third-party dependencies are undocumented, so outages become “unforeseen.” ¹

Frequent implementation mistakes (and how to avoid them)

1. Confusing resilience with incident response.
   Fix: keep a distinct register of resilience requirements and mechanisms; IR is a component, not the whole story. ¹

2. Backups without restore verification.
   Fix: require restoration evidence as a control objective; treat failed restores as priority operational risk. ¹

3. Single-region cloud design for critical services without documented rationale.
   Fix: either design for redundancy or document the business decision, compensating controls, and acceptance. ¹

4. Third parties treated as “out of scope.”
   Fix: tie material third parties to service dependency maps, require outage notifications, and maintain a contingency plan per dependency. ¹

5. Evidence sprawl.
   Fix: define an evidence calendar and owners; centralize artifacts in a system of record. Daydream can manage mappings and recurring evidence collection to keep PR.IR-03 audit-ready. ¹

Enforcement context and risk implications

NIST CSF is a framework, not a regulator by itself. Your practical risk is indirect: PR.IR-03 gaps often become control failures under sector rules that expect operational resilience, business continuity, and incident recovery capabilities. Treat PR.IR-03 as a defensible baseline that reduces downtime, data loss, customer harm, and contractual breach exposure. ¹

Practical 30/60/90-day execution plan

First 30 days (foundation)

• Name executive sponsor and control owner for PR.IR-03. ¹
• Draft the Resilience Requirements Register for your highest-impact services.
• Build dependency maps for each service, including material third parties.
• Identify current mechanisms and gaps; open tracked remediation items.

Days 31–60 (mechanisms + governance)

• Formalize standards/runbooks for backup/restore, failover, and incident operations tied to each critical service. ¹
• Implement missing monitoring for control health (backup failures, replication lag, key dependency checks).
• Add third-party resilience requirements to procurement and renewal workflows (SLAs, notification, support, exit considerations).
• Stand up an exception process with approvals and review cadence.

Days 61–90 (prove it works)

• Execute restore tests and one adverse-scenario tabletop per critical service cluster; track and close remediation items. ¹
• Run at least one failover or resilience validation test where architecture supports it; document results and lessons learned.
• Operationalize evidence collection (calendar, owners, storage). Use Daydream to map PR.IR-03 to policy, procedure, control owner, and recurring evidence collection so audit packets are generated from operations, not a scramble. ¹

Frequently Asked Questions

What counts as a “mechanism” under PR.IR-03?

A mechanism is any technical or procedural control that helps you meet defined resilience requirements in both routine operations and adverse events, and that you can test and evidence. Examples include redundancy, restore-verified backups, segmentation, runbooks, and monitoring tied to service health. ¹

Do we need a formal DR site to satisfy PR.IR-03?

PR.IR-03 does not prescribe a specific architecture. You need mechanisms that meet your documented resilience requirements, plus evidence they work under adverse conditions. If your requirements demand rapid recovery, the architecture must support it. ¹

How do third parties fit into PR.IR-03?

If a third party supports a critical service, you must account for its failure modes in your resilience design and contingency plans. That usually means dependency mapping, contractual expectations, and a tested workaround or recovery plan. ¹

What evidence is most persuasive to auditors?

Time-stamped test results (restore and failover), monitoring reports showing control health, and incident postmortems linked to control improvements tend to be strong evidence. Pair evidence to each requirement in a register so reviewers can trace requirement → mechanism → proof. ¹

We can’t meet a resilience target right now. What should we do?

Document an exception with a risk assessment, compensating controls, and explicit approval from the right decision-maker. Set closure criteria and review it on a defined cadence so it is managed risk, not an unknown gap. ¹

How should we structure ownership for PR.IR-03 across teams?

Assign accountability at the service owner level, with platform owners responsible for shared mechanisms like backup tooling and logging. GRC should own the register, evidence calendar, and exception workflow so operational proof stays consistent across services. ¹

Footnotes

1. NIST CSWP 29

2. NIST CSF 1.1 to 2.0 Core Transition Changes