What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on BCR-04 Business Continuity Planning?

Approved business continuity plan with version, owner and distribution list; Traceability from the plan to resilience strategies and BIA outputs; Plan review records and change history; Copies of the plan available to responders offline or out of band.

What is the most common gap auditors find on BCR-04?

Plan not derived from the current strategy and BIA

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

`BCR-04` Business Continuity Planning

A business continuity plan is approved, documented, communicated, applied, evaluated and kept current, grounded in what the resilience strategies and capabilities produced.

Source: CSA CCM v4.1, BCR-04. 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

moderate

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

Plan review records and change history · Policy repository / GRC workspace

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

none for this control

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Approved business continuity plan with version, owner and distribution list · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Traceability from the plan to resilience strategies and BIA outputs · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Copies of the plan available to responders offline or out of band · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

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

Common gaps auditors find

Plan not derived from the current strategy and BIA
Plan stored only on systems that would be unavailable in a disruption
Contact lists and roles in the plan out of date

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-03 Business Continuity Strategy · BCR-05 Documentation