A bit of history
Let’s do a little refresh about the ISO 27001 and 27002 standard. Back in the nineties the British Standard Institution (BSI) published the British Standard 7799, written by the UK Government’s Department of Trade and Industry. This standard consisted of 2 parts:
– Part 1 was a code of practice which could be seen as an ‘extensive buffet’ of security controls which could be implemented to manage information security
– Part 2 contained the specifications on how to implement an ISMS, including the introduction of the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle in a future release.
Later on, both parts were adopted by ISO. After some revisions and name changes the BS 7799-1 standard is nowadays known as the ISO 27002 standard, while the BS 7799-2 standard is now known as the ISO 27001 standard.
Why certify?
ISO27002 contains only best practices and guidelines. So certification is done against ISO 27001. A decade ago, Belgian companies were not very eager to obtain this certification. And why would they? There was no real pressure from governments, clients or other organisations to clearly prove they securely manage information. And of course, there were not as many threats as we face today.
The last few years we noticed a significant change. Why? Two reasons. First, organisations need to protect themselves against the continuous introduction of new cyber threats, cyber attacks, vulnerabilities, technologies, social engineering techniques and even human errors. Second, organisations are required to comply with new legislation as well as specific industry standards.
GDPR
The GDPR requires organisations processing personal data to ‘adequately protect data’. But when is your data ‘adequately protected’ and even more: how can you easily prove you ‘adequately protect’ your data? ISO 27001 certification is one of the answers. Obtaining the certificate indicates that your organisation followed a risk based approach to identify and implement effective and efficient security controls to protect information on a continuous basis. As such, the certificate will be a great value when proving ‘adequate protection of data’ towards data protection authorities.
NIS
As far as the Belgian application of the European ‘Directive on security of network and information systems’ (NIS Directive) is concerned, we can determine that ISO certification will also be the preferred way to prove that an ISMS is maintained and that efficient security controls are in place to appropriately protect information. The transposition of the NIS Directive into a Belgian law is still in progress. As soon as the law is effective and the applicable organisations are notified, organisations have twelve months to adapt their information security policy and another twelve months to have all security controls implemented.
Both GDPR and the NIS directive indicate that obtaining or maintaining ISO 27001 certification will become more important than ever. At Toreon we assist clients in different sectors to get ISO 27001 certified. Our approach is direct and pragmatic, allowing certification to have true impact on the organization.
