Process of ISO 27001 Certification

The ISO 27001 certification procedure can be lengthy and contains numerous steps. Let’s go over the various stages of applying for certification.

ISO 27001 Compliance Essentials

The following major components are required for ISO 27001 compliance:

Scoping. You must examine the full scope of your information management systems and security procedures. Which data and systems are secure, and which are not?

Risk evaluation. Perform a risk assessment to identify potential weaknesses. Consider which are most vulnerable to cyber security dangers and which are unacceptable, implying they must be addressed.

Analyze the gaps. This is a high-level summary of what must be done to assure compliance and qualification for certification.

ISMS creation. Your team will create defined processes, including training, testing, and deployment protocols, to ensure ISO 27001 compliance and best practices in information security.

Decision on certification. You’ll go through an audit, present evidence of compliance, and request for certification once you’ve completed all of the necessary processes for 27001 compliance. An recognized body has the authority to grant or deny certification.

Some of these components will be covered in further detail in the following section, as they are critical to the certification process.

Phase 1: Develop a Project Plan and Review Your Scope

You must identify and document the procedure you will follow to finish the certification process. Your entire team, including CTOs, DevOps leaders, and security experts, should be on board.

The first step in the 27001 certification process is to gain an understanding of where you are presently.

You should go over:

• What information management systems do you have, and where is your data stored?

• The security methods and processes in place, as well as whether they cover your entire ISMS.

• Your existing DevOps and deployment procedures

• Your security tools and how they interact with your technology stack, which includes DevOps and programming tools

Phase 2: Conduct a gap analysis and risk assessment.

After you’ve compiled a list of all of your information systems, you should perform a risk assessment.

This procedure will include the following steps:

• Create criteria for assessing and prioritizing risks.

• Examine the complete information system for potential security vulnerabilities (including processes, hardware, information databases, and intellectual property).

• Document all discovered dangers and decide which pose the most serious, urgent threats.

• Risks should be prioritized for quick resolution, while others should be flagged for later resolution.

Following your initial risk assessment, your gap analysis will compare your current performance to where you need to be in order to complete certification.

Phase 3: Create and Put Security Policies in Place

Based on the gap analysis results, the third phase of ISO cyber security certification is to build and deploy new security processes, policies, training, and tools.

All new security rules and processes should be documented, and your CTO and DevOps executives should fully understand what is changing and why. You may choose to look for continuous compliance tools to assist you in monitoring your team’s compliance and flagging issues as they arise.

Once you’ve established the policies, begin training your team and integrating any new tools into your IT stack. At this stage in the process, you may also want to address some high-risk existing security vulnerabilities.

Phase 4: Conduct an ISO 27001 audit

After you’ve completed (and recorded) all of this, you can apply for ISO 27001 accreditation.

Your ISMS documentation will be reviewed initially by an external ISO 27001 auditor. They want to know that you have the necessary policies and processes in place to reduce security threats and maintain ongoing compliance.

Following that, they will examine your business processes and security procedures.

Manual data collection is an exceedingly time-consuming operation. If you currently have DevOps Compliance software installed in your pipelines, you can easily export the audit train for all deployments to a single CSV file, which contains all of the necessary data without forcing you to sift through CI logs, deployment logs, GitHub problems, and other sources.

There will be no need to gather evidence from CI logs, deployment logs, and third-party apps: everything will be in one location, ready to go.

If you pass the exam, you will be awarded ISO 27001 certification. Your certification is valid for three years after it is issued; after that, you can seek for recertification.

Phase 5: Continued Compliance

The job does not end after you earn your certification. Your team must maintain continuing compliance, which includes performing internal audits on a regular basis and adhering to all of the security protocols and practices that earned you certification in the first place.

Continuous security monitoring is essential because cyber security threats are constantly growing, and many large firms have DevOps teams that roll out dozens, if not hundreds, of deployments on a regular basis.

Closing thoughts

The International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission produced ISO security standards compliance, which is an excellent standard to follow because it is internationally recognized and developed.