Posted on Apr 6, 2021
Compliance requires organizations to have written policies, processes, and procedures. Policies act as the foundation for programs, providing guidance, consistency, and clarity around an organization’s operations. As a set of internal standards, they give your employees repeatable steps for managing legal and compliance risk. As you mature your compliance posture, knowing what an information security policy is and what it should include can help you protect sensitive information more effectively.
An information security policy (ISP) sets forth rules and processes for workforce members, creating a standard around the acceptable use of the organization's information technology, including networks and applications to protect data confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
ISPs establish formalized rules to ensure that the company has a series of controls around the three principles of information security: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
Data confidentiality focuses on protecting sensitive information, such as nonpublic personal information (PII) or cardholder data (CD), from unauthorized access. Malicious actors often target confidential information because the data can be used for identity theft and perpetrating fraud. Confidential data can also include sensitive corporate information such as trade secrets.
When writing your ISP, you want to consider the following:
Data integrity focuses on ensuring that data accuracy and preventing changes to information entered into a database or other resource. Organizations need to maintain data quality by preventing malicious or accidental changes to data that can harm data owners.
When writing your ISP, you want to consider the following:
Data availability focuses on information accuracy, completeness, and consistency to ensure users can access information when they need it. Organizations need to establish procedures and processes for data storage, disaster recovery, and business continuity.
When writing your ISP, you want to consider the following:
Information security policies have more than one purpose. Because they have more than one purpose, they often feel unwieldy.
Some reasons you need to have an ISP include:
Your ISP sets forth high-level controls for protecting information and then to measure compliance more efficiently. Then, you incorporate additional protections as part of processes and procedures. For example, you may include in your ISP that you have firewall rules that prevent workforce members from accessing risky websites. You then build your firewall rules separately, allowing access to certain websites and denying access to others.
Your ISP sets the rules that your information security program puts into practice. A good way to think about the difference is that your ISP acts like an introduction in an essay that tells someone what you’re going to tell them to do. Meanwhile, your information security program is the set of practices that act as the body of an essay, giving the specific data points your reader needs to know.
An information security program outlines the critical business processes and IT assets that you need to protect. Then, it identifies the people, processes, and technologies that can impact data security. Your information security program incorporates more than your ISP, including areas like incident management, enterprise security architecture, and vulnerability management.
SecurityScorecard’s security ratings platform continuously monitors risks across ten categories of risk, including IP reputation, network security, web application security, DNS health, patching cadence, and endpoint security. Our platform monitors for best practices giving customers a way to create an ISP that maps directly back to controls.
Our easy-to-read A-F rating scale gives at-a-glance visibility into controls’ effectiveness, and our platform provides actionable remediation suggestions to mitigate risk. Customers can use these to make sure that their policies and programs stay in alignment.
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