Information Security Policies, or more accurately; Policies, Standards, & Procedures (a Policy Set) are the cornerstone of every security program. It is therefore rather odd, that not one client I have ever helped started with any of them in place. While not everyone is a security expert, everyone can be security savvy enough if, and ONLY if, what they are supposed to do is written down!

That’s what a good Policy Set is; an instruction manual on what to do, what not to do, why, and how.

I have written too many many times on why a good Policy Set is important, and have used the term ‘baseline’ more times than I’ve had hot dinners. I have described what a Policy Set consists of, and even how to manage one, but what I have not do up till now was to describe how to find a Policy Set that’s right for your business.

First, you may be wondering what’s so hard about finding policies. And I agree; type “information security policy example” into Google and you’ll get tens of millions of hits. Universities readily publish theirs for the world to see (e.g University of Bristol), and a whole host of organizations even make editable versions freely available. On top of that, online services with ridiculous promises like “THE ONLY WAY TO GET AN INFORMATION SECURITY POLICY CUSTOMIZED FOR YOU IN AN HOUR, GUARANTEED.” are depressingly common.

The challenge is that if you’re looking for information security policies in this fashion you clearly have no experience implementing them, let alone actually writing one yourself. An overly-dramatic analogy; I found thousands of instructions on emergency appendectomies, would you now trust me to perform one on you? A good Policy Set is one that is appropriate to your business. Not your industry sector, not the prevailing regulatory requirement, your business!

Therefore, if you don’t have security expertise in-house, it is very unlikely that you know the right questions to asks providers of Policy Sets. The vast majority of vendors will sell you what you ask for (can’t really blame them for this), so ensuring you get what you actually need is entirely based on the homework you performed beforehand.

To that end I have written something vaguely resembling a white paper to help you. In the imaginatively named ‘Choosing the Right Policy Set‘ I have broken the choosing of a policy set vendor into 15 Questions. These could easily form the core of an RFI or RFP if you were taking this seriously enough.

Simple questions like; “Can you provide a Document Management Standard and Procedure?” or “Does your service include a mapping of policy statements to the PCI DSS?” are sometimes not even considered. But when you consider that the choosing of a policy set can be the difference between compliance and non-compliance, it makes sense to ask them. Up front!

90% of organization will end up either throwing something together themselves, or buying the cheapest option available. That’s fine, when regulatory fines start getting handed out they will realize just how expensive their choice was.

via:  davidfroud