A Complete Guide to Security compliance policy

Today’s organizations deal with more confidential information than in any previous point in history. Clients are providing businesses with personal information, financial information, health information and much more. It makes specific information security compliance policies highly desirable to ensure the safety of this data and the confidentiality of the information. However, establishing these policies might not always be a simple process as it may require a lot of resources. However, this process can be made manageable through the use of high quality compliance policy templates.

Compliance Policy Templates Defined

Compliance policy templates refer to compliance policies that are already written but have various sections that can be filled by the organisation to suit its need. They address general security and privacy needs and give sufficient policy guidance. Templates do not begin from scratch, and organizations are only able to fill their information in the professionally drafted policies. This approach can take much time and effort while providing the opportunity to adjust the policies to the systems, data flows and risks of businesses.

Compliance Policy Templates are as follows:

Many useful policy templates are available covering areas such as:

●   Access control – Defines the manner in which system access can be given, altered or withdrawn.

●   Acceptable use: Describes usage of devices and data allowed on the networks.

●   Backup & recovery – Offers information on how to perform and check backup. 

●   Cybersecurity incident response – gives out measures to take in case of a security incident

●   Data classification – Creates standards for organizing the data depending on the level of its classification.

●   Password – Defines basic parameters of the credentials including the complexity and the frequency of rotation.

●   Third party security – looks at security with regards to vendors and business partners 

These templates are only surface level. Comprehensive libraries with over fifty templates that are customizable depending on industry and organizational needs are available.

Security compliance policy that should be developed in an organization to ensure that the necessary level of security compliance is provided are as follows:

As much as templates are of great benefit, developing security policies is a rather delicate and time-consuming process. Key steps include:

Minimize the gap between business and operational concerns – Ignore general aspects such as technological frameworks, financial constraints, cost estimates for skill development of employees, and organizational culture. 

Misclassifying the data – This is one of the worst things that could happen to an organization because it either exposes the crucial assets to more threats than they should or protects other data unnecessarily.

Solving the problem of proper level of specificity – generally made rules are not efficient while very specific rules could be opposed at any time due to predictability.

Setting clear communication expectations, To avoid confusion or misunderstandings or even noncompliance using ambiguous language should be avoided.

Periodic revision and update – As the technology environments change, old policies cease to work and miss some points.

It seems that policy templates provide an essential start in responding to security governance. Besides our capability in converting these resources, organizations can also take a preventive measure against the emerging cyber threats to systems and sensitive information.