Library
ISO/IEC 27001, information security management
ISO · 2022
A certifiable standard for running an information security management system: how an organisation decides what it must protect, judges the risks to it, and keeps the arrangements under review. Clauses 4 to 10 carry the requirements an auditor certifies against; Annex A is the set of 93 controls to select from.
Who this applies to
No law anywhere requires an organisation to be certified against this standard. What requires it is other people: a customer's procurement questionnaire, a public tender, an investor carrying out diligence, or a parent company standardising its suppliers. The trigger is commercial, and it usually arrives with a contractual deadline rather than a statutory one.
Certification is assessed against clauses 4 to 10, which set out how an organisation decides what it must protect, judges the risks, treats them and keeps the arrangements under review. Annex A is the control set it selects from, and the selection has to be justified in a Statement of Applicability. An organisation is certified against the management system, not against Annex A.
The 2022 edition replaced the 2013 one. Under the transition rule the accreditation bodies apply, certificates issued against the 2013 edition ceased to be valid after 31 October 2025, so any current certificate is a 2022 one. A 2013 certificate in a supplier pack today is expired rather than merely old.
For a regulated entity in the European Union, the certificate settles nothing on its own. Neither the network and information security regime nor the financial sector's operational resilience regulation accepts a certificate in place of compliance: both are satisfied by what the organisation actually does, and a supervisor can ask for evidence a certificate does not carry. The same control set will usually serve all three, which is what the mappings on this site are for.
In the United States the certificate is recognised but less often the thing asked for. A United States customer buying a software or hosting service will more commonly ask for a SOC 2 report, and a supplier selling on both sides of the Atlantic is often asked for both.
What is in it
- 4 Context of the organization
- 5 Leadership
- 6 Planning
- 6.1 Actions to address risks and opportunities
- 6.2 Information security objectives and planning to achieve them
- 6.3 Planning of changes
- 7 Support
- 8 Operation
- 9 Performance evaluation
- 10 Improvement
- A.5 Organizational controls
- A.5.1 Policies for information security
- A.5.2 Information security roles and responsibilities
- A.5.3 Segregation of duties
- A.5.4 Management responsibilities
- A.5.5 Contact with authorities
- A.5.6 Contact with special interest groups
- A.5.7 Threat intelligence
- A.5.8 Information security in project management
- A.5.9 Inventory of information and other associated assets
- A.5.10 Acceptable use of information and other associated assets
- A.5.11 Return of assets
- A.5.12 Classification of information
- A.5.13 Labelling of information
- A.5.14 Information transfer
- A.5.15 Access control
- A.5.16 Identity management
- A.5.17 Authentication information
- A.5.18 Access rights
- A.5.19 Information security in supplier relationships
- A.5.20 Addressing information security within supplier agreements
- A.5.21 Managing information security in the ICT supply chain
- A.5.22 Monitoring, review and change management of supplier services
- A.5.23 Information security for use of cloud services
- A.5.24 Information security incident management planning and preparation
- A.5.25 Assessment and decision on information security events
- A.5.26 Response to information security incidents
- A.5.27 Learning from information security incidents
- A.5.28 Collection of evidence
- A.5.29 Information security during disruption
- A.5.30 ICT readiness for business continuity
- A.5.31 Legal, statutory, regulatory and contractual requirements
- A.5.32 Intellectual property rights
- A.5.33 Protection of records
- A.5.34 Privacy and protection of PII
- A.5.35 Independent review of information security
- A.5.36 Compliance with policies, rules and standards for information security
- A.5.37 Documented operating procedures
- A.6 People controls
- A.6.1 Screening
- A.6.2 Terms and conditions of employment
- A.6.3 Information security awareness, education and training
- A.6.4 Disciplinary process
- A.6.5 Responsibilities after termination or change of employment
- A.6.6 Confidentiality or non-disclosure agreements
- A.6.7 Remote working
- A.6.8 Information security event reporting
- A.7 Physical controls
- A.7.1 Physical security perimeters
- A.7.2 Physical entry
- A.7.3 Securing offices, rooms and facilities
- A.7.4 Physical security monitoring
- A.7.5 Protecting against physical and environmental threats
- A.7.6 Working in secure areas
- A.7.7 Clear desk and clear screen
- A.7.8 Equipment siting and protection
- A.7.9 Security of assets off-premises
- A.7.10 Storage media
- A.7.11 Supporting utilities
- A.7.12 Cabling security
- A.7.13 Equipment maintenance
- A.7.14 Secure disposal or re-use of equipment
- A.8 Technological controls
- A.8.1 User endpoint devices
- A.8.2 Privileged access rights
- A.8.3 Information access restriction
- A.8.4 Access to source code
- A.8.5 Secure authentication
- A.8.6 Capacity management
- A.8.7 Protection against malware
- A.8.8 Management of technical vulnerabilities
- A.8.9 Configuration management
- A.8.10 Information deletion
- A.8.11 Data masking
- A.8.12 Data leakage prevention
- A.8.13 Information backup
- A.8.14 Redundancy of information processing facilities
- A.8.15 Logging
- A.8.16 Monitoring activities
- A.8.17 Clock synchronization
- A.8.18 Use of privileged utility programs
- A.8.19 Installation of software on operational systems
- A.8.20 Networks security
- A.8.21 Security of network services
- A.8.22 Segregation of networks
- A.8.23 Web filtering
- A.8.24 Use of cryptography
- A.8.25 Secure development life cycle
- A.8.26 Application security requirements
- A.8.27 Secure system architecture and engineering principles
- A.8.28 Secure coding
- A.8.29 Security testing in development and acceptance
- A.8.30 Outsourced development
- A.8.31 Separation of development, test and production environments
- A.8.32 Change management
- A.8.33 Test information
- A.8.34 Protection of information systems during audit testing