What is ISO 27001?
ISO 27001 is a modern data security standard establishing rules for an Information Security Managed System (ISMS). It guides you in defining the security scope, managing risks, controlling access, evaluating the system’s performance, and more. This article explains how popular ITSM tools can help you with that.

Why use ITSM tools?

Incident Management
Managing incidents is one of the mandatory ISO 27001 requirements. Companies need to keep track of breach events and weaknesses in order to solve and learn from them quickly and effectively. And with certain types of infractions, authorities and affected parties must be informed.
An ITSM tool serves as an incident tracking system that allows you to report, evaluate, resolve and archive security breaches. Coupled with an on-call alerting feature that briefs your service operators immediately when such an event occurs.

Risk Management
A major part of ISO 27001 is assessing and mitigating risks. You need to constantly monitor your IT systems for new threats and vulnerabilities, decide how to treat them, and document these actions. The service management tools allow you to log these potential risks as tickets, which is crucial for identifying and assessing them.

Change management
Change management is another important aspect of ISO 27001 – changes to the ISMS must be documented, assessed for risks, approved by the relevant stakeholders and tested before being deployed into the production use.

This process is well supported by popular ITSM tools’ predefined, ITIL-compliant change tracking workflow. You can assign approvers that will assess and authorize the change.

Access management
This module covers the need for an access control process defining how permissions are granted or revoked. The goal of this is to ensure only the authorized people can access the necessary systems..
ITSM tools make this as transparent and simple as possible. Access requests and revocations are kept as tickets with a clear description and audit trail, making access is granted to authorized personnel only.

Automated Audits
Periodically reviewing your IT systems for new threats, correct access rights, an accurate scope and compliant assets is necessary for your information security to stay in top shape. Automation is the stronghold of many ITSM tools. They help to create tasks for IT security stakeholders at regular intervals as a reminder of upcoming ISMS reviews, automating a crucial part of the ISO 27001 implementation.

Collaborative Documentation
Keeping clear documentation is necessary for ISMS systems to work. You need to track your risk assessment processes, the scope of the ISMS, results of treatment actions and auditing results, along with the points we mentioned previously for each of the modules.

Some Service Management solutions provide a documentation platform, which can easily work as a knowledge repository for this purpose – it keeps all information about your systems in one place.
Conclusion

ITSM solutions, can support all the important ISO 27001 modules and provide a platform for continuous improvements

By Kamil Beer, VMotion IT Solutions

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