What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on BCR-06 Business Continuity Exercises?

Exercise and test schedule for continuity plans; Exercise reports with scenario, participants, results and lessons learned; Failover or recovery test logs showing achieved recovery times; Action tracker for issues found in exercises.

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

Tabletop exercises only, with no technical recovery test

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

`BCR-06` Business Continuity Exercises

Continuity and resilience plans are exercised and tested every year as a minimum, or when significant changes occur.

Source: CSA CCM v4.1, BCR-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 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

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

Failover or recovery test logs showing achieved recovery times · Backup / DR tooling

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Exercise reports with scenario, participants, results and lessons learned · Document repository

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Exercise and test schedule for continuity plans · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Action tracker for issues found in exercises · Document repository

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

Tabletop exercises only, with no technical recovery test
No exercise after a significant architecture change
Lessons learned recorded but not acted on

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-05 Documentation · BCR-07 Communication