ISO/IEC 27001 – Information Security Management Systems Certification

ISO/IEC 27001 – Information Security Management Systems Certification

Implementing an information security management system will provide your organisation with a system that will help to eliminate or minimise the risk of a security breach that could have legal or business continuity implications.

An effective ISO 27001 information security management system (ISMS) provides a management framework of polices and procedures that will keep your information secure, whatever the format.

Following a series of high profile cases, it has proven to be very damaging to an organisation if information gets into the wrong hands or into the public domain. By establishing and maintaining a documented system of controls and management, risks can be identified and reduced.

Achieving ISO 27001 certification shows that a business has:

Protected information from getting into unauthorised hands
Ensured information is accurate and can only be modified by authorised users
Assessed the risks and mitigated the impact of a breach
Been independently assessed to an international standard based on industry best practices

ISO 27001 certification demonstrates that you have identified the risks, assessed the implications and put in place systemised controls to limit any damage to the organisation.

Benefits include:

Increased reliability and security of systems and information
Improved customer and business partner confidence
Increased business resilience
Alignment with customer requirements
Improved management processes and integration with corporate risk strategies

Achieving ISO 27001 is not a guarantee that information breaches will never occur, however by having a robust system in place, risks will be reduced and disruption and costs kept to a minimum.

Process stages

Some of the stages you will need to go through to protect your business and achieve ISO 27001 include:

Assessing the potential risks to your business and identifying areas that are vulnerable.
Implementing a management system that covers the entire organisation will help to control how and where information is stored and used.
Maintaining a process to manage current and future information security policy.
Making employees and third party contractors aware of the risks and incident reporting.
Monitoring system activity and logging user activities.
Keeping IT systems up to date with the latest protection.
System access control.