What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on OPS-06 Data Backup and Recovery - Concept?

Backup policy stating retention per data class alongside the agreed RTO and RPO; Encryption standard and key handling rules applied to backup sets; Authorisation matrix naming who may trigger a restore; Mapping of customer contract terms onto the internal backup schedule.

What is the most common gap auditors find on OPS-06?

Retention in the policy shorter than the periods promised to customers in contract

BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) · C5: Operations

`OPS-06` Data Backup and Recovery - Concept

Document and communicate backup and recovery policies fixing backup scope, frequency and retention against contractual and internal RTO and RPO targets, requiring state of the art encryption of backups, restricting restores to authorised persons and mandating recovery testing.

Source: BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue), OPS-06. The statement above is our statement of the clause, read from the published text and cited so you can check it against the official text, not the instrument verbatim. Open BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) in the compliance library.

The edition of the catalogue is not stamped here; check the edition your attestation is issued against.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

moderate

to go live

Backup / DR tooling

where the evidence lives

teal = a system already holds it · olive = produced at each review. To go live: easy when half or more of the artefacts are already held by a system, moderate from a quarter to a half, hard below a quarter.

These are the artefacts auditors commonly ask for on this requirement, our guidance rather than text from the standard. Your assessor decides what is sufficient in your context, and asks for samples across the period when a report covers one.

system holds itEvidence a system already holds

Encryption standard and key handling rules applied to backup sets · Backup / DR tooling

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

none for this control

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Backup policy stating retention per data class alongside the agreed RTO and RPO · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Authorisation matrix naming who may trigger a restore · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Mapping of customer contract terms onto the internal backup schedule · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

Start with the 1 of 4 artefacts that already live in a system (Backup / DR tooling); keep the periodic reviews but log each one as a dated record with a named reviewer.

Common gaps auditors find

Retention in the policy shorter than the periods promised to customers in contract
Policy silent on where backup encryption keys are held and who controls them
Restore authority expressed as a role that no longer exists in the organisation
Policy scoped to databases while configuration, secrets and infrastructure state are omitted

Do this for your whole sheet

Paste the rows you run your controls from and get this mapping for every control at once, with the periodic-review ones flagged and a first move per row. No account for the first run.

Build my evidence sheet

OPS-05 Protection Against Malware - Implementation · OPS-07 Data Backup and Recovery - Monitoring