What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on PI-03 Secure deletion of data?

Erasure procedure spanning the live environment, metadata stores and backup media; Completion confirmation issued for a terminated customer within the agreed period; Technical description of the wiping or key destruction method relied upon; Backup retention schedule showing when residual copies finally expire.

What is the most common gap auditors find on PI-03?

Live data removed while backup copies persist to the end of an unchanged retention cycle

BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) · C5: Portability and Interoperability

`PI-03` Secure deletion of data

Erase customer data at the end of the contractual relationship in line with the agreed terms, covering the customer environment, metadata and backup copies, using methods that defeat recovery by forensic means.

Source: BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue), PI-03. 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

hard

to go live

Policy repository / GRC workspace

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

none for this control

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Completion confirmation issued for a terminated customer within the agreed period · Document repository

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Erasure procedure spanning the live environment, metadata stores and backup media · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Technical description of the wiping or key destruction method relied upon · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Backup retention schedule showing when residual copies finally expire · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

No system holds this evidence for you: it is people and documents. Reminders and routing to the owner still save time. Put the document under version control with an owner and review date, and log each review as a record with reviewer and date.

Common gaps auditors find

Live data removed while backup copies persist to the end of an unchanged retention cycle
Metadata, audit trails and derived indexes retained after the content itself is gone
Removal limited to deleting pointers, leaving content readable from the underlying media

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

PI-02 Contractual agreements for the provision of data · PS-01 Physical Security and Environmental Control Requirements