What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on BCR-05 Documentation?

Index of continuity documentation (runbooks, recovery procedures, supplier contacts, network diagrams); Supplier continuity documentation obtained from key third parties; Access list showing which stakeholders can reach the documentation; Review records for the documentation set.

What is the most common gap auditors find on BCR-05?

Supplier recovery commitments not obtained or held

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

`BCR-05` Documentation

Documentation needed to support continuity and resilience plans is developed, identified and obtained from inside the organisation and from external parties. It is made available to authorised stakeholders and reviewed every year as a minimum or after significant changes.

Source: CSA CCM v4.1, BCR-05. 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

Vendor register / contract 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

Review records for the documentation set · Document repository

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Index of continuity documentation (runbooks, recovery procedures, supplier contacts, network diagrams) · Vendor register / contract repository
Supplier continuity documentation obtained from key third parties · Vendor register / contract repository
Access list showing which stakeholders can reach the documentation · 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

Supplier recovery commitments not obtained or held
Runbooks out of date after system changes
Documentation held where responders cannot reach it during an outage

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-04 Business Continuity Planning · BCR-06 Business Continuity Exercises