ISO 27001 clearly recognises that there is no such thing as a one size fits all approach to documentation. Instead, it recommends that the extent of the ISMS documentation should reflect the complexity of the organisation and its security requirements.
In practical terms, there are four levels of documentation in an ISMS, and each level has different characteristics, including about who is entitled to make decisions regarding revisions to the documents. The four levels are:
- Board-approved corporate policies, which drive all other aspects of the ISMS. There will normally be one high-level information security policy supported by a number of additional, subject-specific policies (setting out, for instance, what constitutes acceptable use of the Internet).
- Detailed procedures that describe who is responsible for doing what, when and in what order.
- Operations/work instructions, that set out in detail precisely how each of the identified tasks are performed.
- Records, which provide evidence of what was done.
The most demanding, in terms of time, is producing the third level – even though this is often simply the process of documenting existing ways of carrying out specific activities.
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Excerpts in this blog post were taken from Alan Calder’s Nine Steps to Success – An ISO 27001 Implementation Overview, Third edition.