ISO 27001 – Helping To Protect Your Information

ISO 27001 – Helping To Protect Your Information

So what can we expect from certification to ISO 27001 when it comes to protecting our business information?

Let’s move aside the generic benefits of ISO certification for a moment. We know it will help demonstrate good practices, improve working relationships, help retain existing clients and provide an edge over our competitors.

Here’s a quick look at the areas this auditable international standard, that defines the requirements of an information security management system (ISMS), looks to manage your risk against the likes of cyber-attacks, hacks, data leaks or data theft.

Implementing an ISMS / Improving Data Security

Secures your information whatever the format – There are so many varied formats in which you may be currently storing your information. This can include digital, paper-based, intellectual property, company secrets, data on devices and in the Cloud, hard copies and personal information to name but a few. An ISMS helps protect all forms of information.

Cyber-attacks. Increase your Resilience – By targeting and looking directly at the way your business currently tackles potential cyber-attacks, certification will help you to implement and maintain an ISMS that significantly increases your resilience to this type of threat.

Adding A Framework That Can Be Centrally Managed – Once implemented its crucial you are able to keep your business information safe and managed centrally. ISO 27001 provides a framework for this, managing it all in one place.

Offers organisation-wide protection – It protects your entire organisation from technology-based risks and other, more common threats, such as poorly informed staff or ineffective procedures.

Helps respond to evolving security threats – Risks & threats to your data security will evolve constantly with influences potentially from both inside your organisation and externally such as environment. An ISMS will look to reduce the threat of these continually evolving risks.

Reduces costs associated with information security – Thanks to the risk assessment and analysis approach of an ISMS, organisations can reduce costs by identifying & enhancing historical approaches which may have spent on indiscriminately adding layers of defensive technology that might not work.

Protects confidentiality, availability and integrity of data – An ISMS offers a set of policies, procedures, technical and physical controls to protect the confidentiality, availability and integrity of information.

Embeds Information Security As Part Of Your Business Culture – Education of staff throughout your business relating to the protection of your information is also covered. You should certainly want your workforce to realise it’s not just an IT department issue. The Standard’s holistic approach covers the whole organisation and encompasses people, processes and technology. This enables employees to readily understand risks and embrace security controls as part of their everyday working practices.

So certification to ISO 27001 through establishing, maintaining and continually improving an ISMS, can add many benefits to the way you look to protect your business information.

The requirements are intended to be applicable to all organisations, regardless of type, size or nature. So whether you’re looking to enhance existing information security controls or indeed implement them for the first time, the benefits make it worth looking into.

We hope you enjoyed this article. If you would like any more information on this or any other the ISO’s, please get in contact with us.