Answer: I'd say the best way is by examples. In general, the benefits of management systems are related to:
- Enhanced competitive edge
- Reduction on losses due to security incidents
- Reduction on fines due to legal or contractual non conformity
- Improvement of internal organization
So, the point is to identify for each organization examples that can be related to their context, so it will be easier for the employees and management to figure out the benefits on adopting a management system culture.
Answer: The shortest method is following the best recommended sites regarding the ISO standard you work on, as well as top experts in the field. Often they publish some articles, videos and podcast that you can use to stay up to date with the most recent news about the standard. I recommend you to see our Academies blogs and subscribe to those that interest you:
ISO 27001 & ISO 27017 & ISO 27018 Cloud Documentation Toolkit at this link: W/…/cloud-documentation-toolkit
Would this be part of the 27001 toolkit?
Documentation elaboration
Answer: First of all, you have to carefully study the standards requirements, as well as other requirements defined by the organization (e.g., laws, industry regulations, contracts, etc.) to identify what is being demanded. A common mistake when writing policies and procedures is including things that are not required, because people think this way the documentation will look better. You have to avoid this.
Some other tips I can tell you are:
- ensure the documentation will be understandable by their intended readers
- try to keep the quantity of documents at a minimum, but also do not create few documents with dozens of pages (in both ways the documentation will quickly be abandoned)
- make use of templates to ensure people can find the same type of information in the same section of every document.
Answer: It's our policy not to make recommendations about specific tools, but what I can say to you is that not all controls are fit for using tools, because some of them require human interpretation of the results.
However, for tasks like documentation version control or measurement gathering the use of tools are quite recommended.
Answer: On pre-sale phase you should look for information like: type of business, number of employees, number of locations, number of departments, main business process, and if the organization has previous experience with ISO management systems. With this information you can have an overall idea of the business and make an estimative of effort and time required and values for your job.
These articles will provide you further explanation about scope definition:
- How to define the ISMS scope https://advisera.com/27001academy/knowledgebase/how-to-define-the-isms-scope/
- Problems with defining the scope in ISO 27001 https ://advisera.com/27001academy/blog/2010/06/29/problems-with-defining-the-scope-in-iso-27001/
Answer: I'm assuming you are asking if ISO 27001 certified organizations also needs to certify on ISO 20000. Considering that, I can say to you that being ISO 27001 certified does not ensure you are compliant with all requirements of ISO 20000 (ISO 27001 covers information security, while ISO 20000 covers IT services), so if an organization decides, or is required, to operate an IT service management system, it will need to work with ISO 20000 also, but as I said before, the effort will be lesser, because some requirements are already covered by ISO 27001 certified system.
(Which reference in the sales topic is considered when defining the profit margin for services rendered. As a professional independent auditor consultant?)
Answer: This answer depend on many variables (e.g., competitors in the market, customer's negotiation power, local taxes and regulations, the consultant experience and specialization levels, etc.) and business strategy.
Cost avoidance due to ISO ISMS
Answer: Yes, there is. For ISO 27001 one good reference is the Cost of Cyber Crime Report from Ponemon Institute (https://www.ponemon.org/library/2016-cost-of-cyber-crime-study-the-risk-of-business-innovation) (specifically see page 18 - Total cost of cyber crime for low versus high security profiles), but you have to be very careful when presenting these type of data to customers, because each organization has its unique context that can affect the risks to each one that are exposed and the impacts they may suffer, so basing on an opportunity to avoid costs in data from another organization can lead to wrong conclusions. You could say that these are only examples and that specif data about the client's organization must be evaluated to provide a more precise situation.