What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on BCR-03 Business Continuity Strategy?

Documented continuity and resilience strategy per critical service; Architecture records showing resilience measures (for example multi-zone deployment, failover); Approval of the strategy by management; Link between strategy choices and BIA recovery objectives.

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

Strategy not linked to the recovery objectives from the BIA

CSA CCM v4.1 · BCR - Business Continuity Management and Operational Resilience

`BCR-03` Business Continuity Strategy

Strategies are put in place to lessen the impact of business disruptions and to strengthen resilience and recovery from them.

Source: CSA CCM v4.1, BCR-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 CSA CCM v4.1 in the compliance library.

Version 4.1 adds 11 controls (among them API security, log sanitisation and a service bill of materials) and renumbers several domains. CSA accepts v4.0.x during its transition; if your STAR assessment is still on v4.0.1, check the numbering against it.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

hard

to go live

Document repository

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

Architecture records showing resilience measures (for example multi-zone deployment, failover) · Backup / DR tooling
Approval of the strategy by management · Document repository

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Documented continuity and resilience strategy per critical service · Document repository
Link between strategy choices and BIA recovery objectives · 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

Strategy not linked to the recovery objectives from the BIA
Strategy covers recovery only and nothing to reduce impact up front
Strategies not updated when services move to new infrastructure

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

BCR-02 Risk Assessment and Impact Analysis · BCR-04 Business Continuity Planning