Role of Automation in ISO 27001 certification
- Kamalika Majumder | DevOps & ISO 27001 Consultant
- Jun 18
- 6 min read
Before we deep dive into the role of automation, we need to understand what compliances really mean:
Is it an audit?
Is it an exam?
Is it a process?
Is it a document?
I would say its much more than all of the above.
What are Compliances?
Frameworks to guide organisations on how to secure their assets, manage risks and take necessary steps to govern their information security of systems and services.
Guidelines to Secure Your Precious Assets & Intellectual Property.
Banks, insurance companies, and fintech companies sometimes need more than one compliance such as ISO 27001, OJK to ensure data security and meet their stringent regulations. Their non-compliance can result in hefty fines and reputational damage.
Software development companies, especially those offering SaaS or cloud-based services, often seek ISO 27001, PCI or SOC2 compliance for data security. Compliance guidance can ensure practices align with industry standards and legal requirements.
The ISO 27001 compliance in particular ensures that businesses establish, implement, maintain, and continually improve an information security management system (ISMS).
However, the process of obtaining and maintaining certification is labor-intensive, requiring meticulous documentation, monitoring, and compliance adherence.
This is where automation steps in, transforming the journey into a more efficient, accurate, and scalable process.
The Challenge of Manual Processes in ISO 27001
Traditional approaches to ISO 27001 certification involve manual tasks like compiling security policies, auditing processes, and generating compliance reports.
While feasible for small-scale organisations, this approach becomes burdensome as the organisation scales or faces increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Key challenges of manual processes include:
Human Errors: From misconfigured settings to missed updates, human errors can lead to non-compliance.
Time-Consuming Audits: Tracking and verifying compliance across departments is labor-intensive.
Resource Drain: Significant manpower is required to document controls, conduct risk assessments, and generate evidence for auditors.
Scalability Issues: As organisations expand, ensuring every new system, vendor, or employee adheres to ISO 27001 controls becomes increasingly difficult.
Other Challenges Include:
Automation of infra components, avoid reinventing the wheel.
Documented Evidence Collection.
Application compatibility.
Portability across cloud platforms
Continuous Integration and delivery of security as code.
Testing the policies on infrastructure and application.
Ex: ISO 27001 requires a recertification every 3 years and an annual internal audit every year. Similarly partners and suppliers must comply as well.
These challenges underscore the need for automation, which can help streamline processes and free up human resources for strategic tasks.
How Automation Helps:
Automation plays a pivotal role across various stages of the ISO 27001 certification lifecycle, from implementing controls to ongoing maintenance. Below are some critical areas where automation can make a difference:
1. Risk Management - Assessment and Treatment
Risk assessment is the critical first step in ISO 27001 implementation. Companies must define rules and steps for managing risks such as:
What is an acceptable risk: For a small consulting company losing the last 4 hours of data can be an acceptable risk, but for a large telecom company it's not because they won't be able to charge thousands of their customers.
Risk assessments are central to ISO 27001 compliance, requiring organizations to identify, evaluate, and mitigate risks. Automation can:
Use pre-built frameworks to assess risks based on severity and likelihood.
Generate visualisations for decision-making.
Continuously monitor systems to detect and flag emerging vulnerabilities.
This ensures a proactive approach to risk management, rather than relying on periodic manual assessments.
2. Control Implementation
ISO 27001 mandates the implementation of various controls to safeguard information assets. Automation simplifies this by:
Applying pre-defined security configurations across systems using Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC).
Automating user provisioning and de-provisioning to align with access control policies.
Ensuring consistent application of encryption and backup protocols.
For example, Automated deployment or patch management pipelines can be configured to enforce secure coding practices and verify compliance with security standards during development. This also makes the entire process version controlled, auditable and easier to share as evidence.
3. Monitoring and Logging
Clause 9 of ISO 27001 focuses on performance evaluation, requiring organisations to monitor their systems and gather evidence of compliance. Automation tools excel in:
Collecting logs from multiple systems and correlating them for insights.
Generating real-time alerts for suspicious activities.
Providing auditors with centralised dashboards showcasing compliance metrics.
By integrating automated monitoring tools with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems, organisations can ensure continuous compliance.
4. Incident Response
Timely detection and response to security incidents are critical for ISO 27001 adherence. Automated incident response platforms:
Trigger predefined actions when anomalies are detected, such as isolating affected systems or notifying stakeholders.
Maintain an incident log for audit purposes.
Enable faster recovery by automating remediation tasks like patch deployment.
These capabilities reduce the risk of prolonged exposure to threats and ensure compliance with ISO 27001 requirements for managing security incidents.
5. Documentation and Reporting
Maintaining up-to-date documentation is an important and mandatory step in the PDCA cycle of ISO 27001 certification. Automation tools can:
Generate evidence reports on compliance status.
Maintain version-controlled records of implemented policies and procedures.
Streamline evidence collection for audits by integrating with system logs and configurations.
This eliminates the manual effort involved in compiling and maintaining compliance documentation.
Benefits of Automation in ISO 27001 Certification
The adoption of automation delivers a multitude of benefits that go beyond merely easing the certification process:
Accuracy and Consistency: Automation minimise human errors and ensure consistent application of controls across the organisation.
Scalability: Automation enables organisations to scale their ISMS effortlessly, accommodating growth without compromising compliance.
Real-Time Insights: Continuous monitoring provides actionable insights, helping organisations stay ahead of potential threats.
Cost Efficiency: By reducing manual labor and streamlining processes, automation lowers the overall cost of compliance.
Audit Readiness: With real-time dashboards and automated evidence collection, organisations are always prepared for audits, reducing the stress of last-minute preparations.
Overcoming Challenges in Automation
One of my clients, a leading Southeast Asian unicorn, wanted to launch a financial services application in Indonesia. They needed to certify their infrastructure with ISO 27001 compliance.
Here are some of the challenges I faced while building their setup:
Absence of a reliable cloud provider that was compliant with regulatory requirements. Due to which the entire setup had to be built in on-premise Datacenters.
Lack of IaC tools for bare metal virtualisation platforms needed for infrastructure automation which was necessary to achieve the SLA and RTO/RPO benchmarks.
Dynamic on demand disk allocation was impossible since it was all on hardware storage area networks.
Strict timeline of 4 months.
Real time data replication between two separate data centres.
Limited operations support for on-premise systems.
Ready the full project story here, to find out how I managed to address these challenges and build a compliance ready infrastructure for their Financial Services application.
While automation brings numerous advantages, organizations must address challenges like:
Tool Integration: Ensuring compatibility between legacy systems and modern automation tools.
Skill Gaps: Training staff to use and manage automation tools effectively.
These challenges can be mitigated through strategic planning, phased implementation, and partnerships with skilled vendors.
A variety of tools and platforms can help in this process such as:
IaC Frameworks: Terraform and Ansible automate the secure deployment of infrastructure in alignment with ISO 27001 controls.
Cloud Compliance Tools: AWS Config, Audit Manager, Security Hub and similar tools ensure cloud resources comply with security benchmarks.
SIEM Solutions: Splunk and Sentinel automate monitoring and incident management. Additionally tools like Opensearch, Security Lake can be used for centralised logging & monitoring of security incidents.
Conclusion:
An organisation's objective must be to design and implement a security policy for cloud infrastructure based on industry-accepted norms that can get them ready for third party information security audit.
As businesses navigate the complexities of modern information security, embracing automation is no longer an option—it is a necessity.
The outcome of implementing automation is significant. Security policies can become an integral part of the infrastructure creation process, embedded as a first-class member in every stage of the application lifecycle and help in:
Automated deployment & auditing of changes.
Automated Testing & Configuration Management.
Version Controlled Evidence Collection.
Pre-Audit Preparation.
Post-Audit Review.
Need to get ISO 27001 or SOC2 Compliant, but not sure where to start!
Thanks & Regards
Kamalika Majumder
