ISMS Best Practices : Survival in Cyber Security Landscape

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An Information Security Management System (ISMS) helps establish policies, standards, procedures, and security controls to minimize security risks to organizations' sensitive data and systems to ensure business continuity. An ISMS systematically address employee behavior and business processes centered around data, applications, networks, and systems minimizing risks to acceptable levels.

ISO/IEC 27001 international standard provides comprehensive guidelines to establish an ISMS for an organization of any size. This standard provides requirements for documentation of ISMS scope, organization security policies, security objectives, conducting risk assessments, application of security controls, user training, supplier compliance, internal auditing, management review, corrective and preventive actions, and continual improvement to gain 27001 certifications. 

An ISMS provides a holistic approach to managing the security of information systems within an organization. It helps protect sensitive data which may include personal data, intellectual property, financial data, customer data, cloud data, and data entrusted to third parties.

An ISMS:

• Help organizations to meet regulatory compliance, and avoid hefty fines and legal suits.
• It reduces the number of security incidents, such as cyber-attacks, resulting in fewer disruptions and less downtime, which helps ensure maintaining business continuity.
• Reduces costs in security and defenses by managing risks of all information assets. 
• Improves an organization's security culture by encouraging all employees to understand the risks tied to the business processes and information assets. It trains staff to adopt information security best practices in their work routines.
• Help the organization to prepare and adapts to emerging threats in changing cyber security landscape.  

The following are some ISMS best practices:

• Understand business needs, critical operations, tools, systems, and internal and external environments.
• Study how the ISO 27001 framework can help establish an ISMS to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data and systems of the organization.
• Guaranteeing top management commitment by establishing an information security policy and objectives for establishing an ISMS
• Clearly define roles and responsibilities for managing ISMS.
• Conducting periodic risk assessments annually or when the organization change, identifying risk treatment options and creating a plan for mitigation of risks.
• Implementing security controls as identified in the statement of applicability (SOA) based on ISO 27001 Annex controls.
• Monitor and measure implemented security controls as a part of business processes, and record results to enable auditing.
•  Monitor data access control policies to ensure that only authorized individuals are gaining access to sensitive information. 
• Conduct security awareness training for all employees educating them on evolving threats, and common vulnerabilities to help prevent any compromises. 
• Protect all organizational devices from physical damage as well as potential hacking attempts. 
• Monitor all endpoints, servers, IoT systems, and clouds with an effective SOP process and threat modeling.
• Encrypt critical data to prevent unauthorized access.
• Back up data regularly, and store copies off-site as well as on-premises and cloud backups.
• Conduct an internal security audit annually as well as organization or infrastructure change, to gain visibility over security controls of the ISMS.

The process of setting up ISMS includes

• Define the scope of the ISMS.
• Identify assets that need to be protected. 
• Conduct a risk assessment to identify likely hood and impact
• Define acceptable levels of risks.
• Identify risk treatment options and security controls.
• Document your information security manual. 
• Implement security controls and mitigation measures.
• Monitor, measure, audit, and review. 
• Make continuous improvements.