Ensuring alignment with proven standards while achieving your unique security goals.
An Information Security Policy (ISP) is a set of governing requirements and guidelines that establish criteria for an organization's processes and practices. An ISP reflects an organization's values with respect to standards and best practices for protecting its users, assets, reputation, and business. An ISP also establishes roles and responsibilities mapped to the goals and requirements of its policy statements.
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Once established, your ISP will guide your organizational procedures, which define in more detail how policies are to be embodied in our day-to-day duties and practices. In turn, we must have procedures for reviewing and continually updating our policy set to ensure it remains aligned with our goals and values over time.
A well built ISP establishes a strong foundation.
Security is complex and ever-evolving so we need a solid foundation upon which to premise proactive and adaptive practices. We aim to be rigorous and process-oriented in security, but even when unexpected scenarios require us to be reactive, we ought to have established guidelines to keep us on the right path.
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Information Security Policies may also factor strongly in compliance requirements and can often feel like a burden. It can be tempting for organizations to download prefab policy templates, but in our experience, without understanding and buy-in from stakeholders, an ISP is rarely effective or enforceable. When a policy is written to map realistic accountability to roles that make sense for your organization, only then can it become an indispensable preventative control for your security program.
How Heighten can help
Heighten's consultants have a wealth of experience in assessing and developing ISPs and a wide variety of other policy and framework development for clients of all sizes and across many industries. We excel at understanding how the specifics of your organization should impact your policy set. We also understand that part of the reason organizations outsource policy development is for efficiency. As such, our services enable you to hit the ground running with a proven methodology by which we customize best practice policies to be effective and enforceable.
Our consultants specialize in asking the right questions to establish your goals and to map policies that will be contextualized to your organization. We learn about your business, environment, and people to make well-grounded recommendations whether it's for your overall ISP or in-depth concerns like change management, vendor management, data enablement, or technical benchmarking.
Talk with an expert today
Elevate your cybersecurity by having a conversation with one of our experts. We are ready to help Heighten your view of what a true security partner looks like.