In Australia, ensuring the security and protection of sensitive data has become increasingly important - high profile cybersecurity attacks on Optus, Medibank and some government organisations has most of our enterprises a little rattled. Most CIO’s by now are well aware of the internationally recognised standard that helps businesses to establish robust information security practices, ISO 27001, however many are still lacking clarity about how to best tackle it. If you're wondering what you need to do about ISO 27001, you're in the right place.
In this blog, we'll guide you through the key aspects of ISO 27001 and the steps you can take to achieve compliance.
Understanding ISO 27001 from a cybersecurity standpoint:
ISO 27001 is an internationally recognised standard that sets requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining, and continually improving an Information Security Management System (ISMS). It provides a systematic approach to managing sensitive information, addressing risks, and safeguarding against potential threats. There have been recent additions to the standard that include:
- Threat intelligence
- Information security for cloud
- ICT readiness for business continuity
- Physical security management
- Configuration management
- Information deletion
- Data masking
- Data loss/leakage protection
- Monitoring
- Web filtering
- Secure coding
Why is this important to Australian organisations?
Complying with ISO 27001 brings several advantages to Australian organisations. It demonstrates your commitment to information security, helps meet legal and regulatory requirements such as the Privacy Act 1988 and Notifiable Data Breaches Scheme, as well as the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act. It also serves to builds customer trust, opens the door for supplier relationships that require ISO 27001 certification of their vendors, and enhances your reputation.
There are a number of proactive measures that will help you in achieving compliance as an Australian organisation.
What proactive ISO 27001-COMPLIANT organisations in Australia are doing today
- They’re conducting gap analyses: by assessing their organisations’ adherence to ISO 27001 requirements in alignment with specific Australian legislative instruments such as the Privacy Act or Notifiable Data Breaches scheme and seeing where they do not match up.
- They’ve got strong scope and objectives: when it comes to compliance, by setting clear scope and objectives of an ISMS or ISO 27001 standard ensures they don’t steer off-course and lose momentum.
- Not over-engineering policies and procedures: successful ISO 27001 compliant organisations are using policy templates, procedural automation and policy creation with efficiency in mind. This helps to keep compliance procedures simple, easy-to-implement and time efficient.
- Using a security specialist to manage cyber risk assessments: key features of compliance such as risk assessment and remediation is often best outsourced to an expert third-party who can provide a holistic view, and detailed analysis of the organisational risk. This saves internal staff from getting lost in the detail and being unable to spot risks at close range.
- Using automation to manage documentation: following the compliance paper-trail through the organisation is arduous and fraught with human error. Companies who are doing compliance well have found solutions for automating the document trail in maintaining compliance.
- Training their staff: The key to adherence is educating employees on ‘why’ information security is important, including privacy obligations and their specific responsibilities in line with it.
- Always being ready for an audit: Ever lost sleep over an upcoming audit? Australian organisations who manage compliance well are ready for audits at a moments’ notice through the implementation of automated compliance solutions, and through the applied expertise of their internal teams, external cybersecurity partners and documented policies. This coordination makes ISO 27001 compliance easy, when it is notoriously hard.
Is there a way to make this easier?
Yes, Cythera works with leading ISO 27001 compliance technologies, coupled with expert cybersecurity capability, to provide businesses with a comprehensive and optimised approach to compliance, that gives time back to IT teams without replacing jobs. We do this by:
- Automating the creation, management, and version control of documentation required for ISO 27001 compliance specific to Australian organisations.
- Providing templates, workflows, and collaboration tools to streamline the process of developing policies, procedures, and control documentation applicable to ISO 27001 and other Australian cybersecurity legislation.
- Automating risk assessment, risk analysis, calculation of risk levels, and frameworks for implementing risk management.
- Automating control implementation and monitoring, including the assignment of responsibilities, tracking of progress, and reports that can be used across the organisation for proactive communication purposes.
Cythera can also monitor, in real-time, the effectiveness of controls, identifying gaps and potential non-compliance issues before they become damaging.
Want to know more? Download our latest business case template or meet with us to discuss in person or via video.
