Answer:
Basically an ISO is developed by the International Organization for Standardization, and a British Standard is developed by British Standards Institution. The International Organization for Standardization is an international body that develops standards ISOs, which is composed by representatives from various national standards organizations, and one of these national standard organizations is the British Standard Institution (it is one of the most important organizations, because the origin of some ISO standards was a British Standard: ISO 9001-BS 5750, ISO 14001-BS 7750, ISO 27001-BS7799).
Sure, you can use your existing security policy, however you have to make sure that existing policy has all the mandatory elements that are prescribed by ISO 27001.
Answer:
The best practice, or the standard commonly used, is to use an unique user ID for each employee, because with this way employees are clearly linked with users, and is easy to follow their actions (for example reviewing logs). So, if you have an user that needs to have special privileges to configure an information system (or to access to special resources), this user is the unique person that should have the password of the administrator, because only this user should perform the changes.
Answer:
From my point of view it is not necessary, I mean, you do not need to have 2 different SOA, but in your unique SOA you can add specific information about each site when a control is implemented in a different way in both sites (although I think that generally the implementation of controls will be equal or similar in both sites). So, you can add a column in your SOA document.
Answer:
From my point of view, the term “risk based risk assessment” is not correct, because you cannot based the risk assessment on a risk to calculate it (has no sense). On the other hand, the asset based risk assessment means that you use assets of your organization to determine and calculate risks.
Important, ISO 27001:2013 does not require an asset based risk assessment, or any other specific method, so you can perform the risk assessment for example with a process based, although our recommendation is the asset based methodology.
Deadline in the List of legal, regulatory, contractual and other requirements
Answer:
In the column "Deadline" of "List of legal, regulatory, contractual and other requirements" you should fill in a deadline until which the compliance job needs to be finished - e.g. if you have a contractual obligation, you should set a date until all the information security obligations must be fulfilled - for example, a client of yours might ask you to implement a special type of authentication when working with them.
Server hardening and ISO 27001
Answer:
ISO 27001 does not require 100% conformity with environment hardening, although you can perform the environment hardening as a best practice. On the other hand, the implementation of ISO 27001 is based on processes and procedures, which can include process to ensure server environment hardening, although this process is not mandatory in ISO 27001 (I mean, it is not mandatory to have specific process to ensure the server environment hardening, although can be a best practice). So, during the review of the implementation of the ISO 27001, all processes and procedures will be reviewed, including process to ensure server environment hardening, obviously if you have implemented it.
We didn't include the Communication Plan in the ISO 27001 toolkit because it is not a mandatory document, and more importantly we think this document would not be very convenient for smaller or mid-sized companies. The problem is - such central document would be very difficult to maintain, because every change in some policy or a procedure would require this plan to change as well.
Much better approach would be to use the elements from the article my colleague has referred to, and place them in particular documents - e.g. in the policy itself define who is in charge of communication, what has to be communicated and to whom.