What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on DCS-18 Datacenter Operations Resilience?

Datacenter resilience design showing redundant power, cooling and network paths; Failover and high-availability test reports; Continuity requirements derived from risk assessment and critical service list; Maintenance procedures that avoid single points of failure during work; Incident records of outages and recovery times against targets.

What is the most common gap auditors find on DCS-18?

Redundancy designed but failover never exercised

CSA CCM v4.1 · DCS - Datacenter Security

`DCS-18` Datacenter Operations Resilience

Processes, procedures and technical measures are defined, put in place and assessed so that the datacenter can keep operating without interruption.

Source: CSA CCM v4.1, DCS-18. 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

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

Incident records of outages and recovery times against targets · Document repository

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Failover and high-availability test reports · Backup / DR tooling

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Datacenter resilience design showing redundant power, cooling and network paths · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Continuity requirements derived from risk assessment and critical service list · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Maintenance procedures that avoid single points of failure during work · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

Mostly documents and reviews. Pull the 1 system-held artefact from your Document repository on a schedule; put the documents under version control with an owner and review date, and log each review as a dated record with a named reviewer.

Common gaps auditors find

Redundancy designed but failover never exercised
Concurrent maintainability not considered, so maintenance causes outages
Resilience requirements not linked to the services customers depend 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

DCS-17 Datacenter Metrics · DSP-01 Security and Privacy Policy and Procedures