NIST CSF 2.0 GV.OC-02: Know Stakeholder Expectations

GV.OC-02 says internal and external stakeholders, and their needs and expectations about cybersecurity risk management, are understood and considered. The short version: know who is counting on you to be secure, and what each group expects.

What good looks like

You have a simple list of stakeholders with what each expects. Internally that might be a board that wants quarterly risk updates and employees who expect their data to be handled with care. Externally it is customers asking for questionnaire answers, partners asking for incident notice terms, regulators with reporting rules, and investors asking about governance.

How to implement it

1. Make a table with four columns: stakeholder, what they expect, where that is written down, and who owns the relationship.
2. Mine real sources. Customer security questionnaires, contracts, board minutes and support tickets tell you more than guessing.
3. Mark expectations you do not yet meet. These become inputs to your risk register.
4. Review the table twice a year, and after any big customer or regulatory change.

Evidence to collect

• The stakeholder table with review dates.
• Examples of expectations traced to a source, such as a contract clause or a questionnaire.
• Risk register entries created because of a stakeholder expectation.

Common gaps

• Only customers are listed, and employees, partners and regulators are skipped.
• Expectations are assumed rather than read from contracts.
• The table exists but never feeds decisions.

Quick check

Sources

• NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 Reference Tool, subcategory GV.OC-02: https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/cybersecurity-framework/filters
• NIST Cybersecurity Framework overview: https://www.nist.gov/cyberframework

The CSF is voluntary guidance. There is no CSF certification, so this post describes how to work toward the outcome, not how to pass an audit.