Information security is becoming more and more important as more than 80% of corporate data is residing in IT systems. More corporates and financial institutions are making it mandatory for their third parties to implement an Information Security Management Systems (ISMS) preferably ISO 27001 to ensure the data managed by the third parties are protected from unauthorized disclosure, unauthorized changes, and available when necessary for authorized users.
ISO 27001 is an ISMS framework, which allows you to structurally implement an information security management system (ISMS). It helps you to identify and record all your organization assets and helps you to understand how important is each of these assets to achieve your business objective and also to meet legal and regulatory requirements. ISO is scalable which means you can implement it only for a process, or one of the offices of your organization, or for the entire company.
Implementing an effective ISMS is not an easy job. It requires management commitment to support the process from the beginning until the end and knowledgeable resources and tools. All these three elements are pre-requisite for the successful implementation of the framework. Without management commitment, the process will not get the attention and priority in the organization which it requires. Without knowledgeable resources, the implemented ISMS may not be effective. Automated tools are now an integral part of any process implementation. ISO 27001 is not an exception. There are many tools available for implementing ISO 27001 which includes Software you can download from your company networks like excel based tools and standalone software.
Other types of tools are cloud-based web applications, which help you to create your own private cloud environment where you can set up your ISMS. The most important advantage of these cloud-based web application is that you do not need to invest heavily in your infrastructure to set-up these tools for ISMS and it’s easy to scale when your business grows in size.