What is ISO 27001?
ISO 27001 is an internationally accomplished standard focused on protecting confidentiality, integrity, and availability of organizational information. It protects information in a systematic and cost-effective style by implementing a suitable Information Security Management System in line to organizational strategic needs and applicable legal/ contractual requirements.
ISO/IEC 27001:2013, as it is popularly known, is used universally by increasing number of organizations for protecting their information, information assets and manage risks associated with the leakage of information. The standards, if rightly implemented and integrated with other organizational processes proactively eliminates security threats and vulnerabilities by implementing a set of policies, procedures, and various formats across the organization. In view of the importance of info security in current day businesses, it provides a set of 114 security controls out of which applicable ones can be selected by each organization. The standard encourages the organizations to meet the requirements in the way they fit into the organizational culture and legal/ contractual situations. An organization dealing with missile software will have an entirely different set of processes compared to another organization dealing with trading of books. ISO 27001:2013 remains equally applicable to both these extreme business scenarios and that is the beauty of it.
Benefits:
Disciplined and sustained implementation of this standard effectively deals with almost all types of security threats including but not limited to cyber-attacks, phishing attacks, financial frauds, and leakage of personally identifiable information, etc. Financial and reputational damage caused by an ineffectual information security posture can be disastrous. We are lucky to have this standard to save us from such unpleasant losses to our information and other assets. Implementing this standard helps organizations to avoid the costly penalties associated with non-compliance with data protection requirements such as the GDPR and PCI DSS.
Compliance with applicable legal and contractual requirements, competitive advantage, lower costs and more and more resilient organization remain the main benefits of this standard.
Need:
ISO 27001 certification is globally accepted and its certification by an accredited certifying body provides most needed marketing edge to service and product providers. This helps you win new business and enhance your reputation with existing clientele. In fact, so many customers use it as a pre-requisite to place orders only on ISO 27001 certified organizations.
Organizations implementing ISMS based on ISO 27001:2013 successfully protect all forms of information, whether digital, paper-based or in the Cloud. In the case of physical or information security attacks, the standard helps to attain much better attack resilience.
- ISO/IEC 27001 certification, you’ll want to consider your options around resourcing carefully.
- The challenges to presented so many businesses are often in not having the internal experience and expertise to manage ISO/IEC 27001 implementation and these are the options typically considered:
- An ISO 27001 implementation guide
- ISO/IEC 27001 Lead Implementer and Internal Auditor/Lead Auditor training
- An ISMS documentation toolkit
- Risk assessment software (if you know that Excel might prove too unwieldly)
- ISO/IEC 27001 Staff awareness training tools
- Use ISO 27001 document toolkits
- Procure information security management software
- Train existing staff
For many businesses, there is often an external driver to be ISO/IEC 27001 certified which in turn places priority on a quick implementation. This can influence the decision of how to resource information security management quite considerably.
