ISO 27001 A.5.27: learning from incidents, explained for startups

A.5.27 Learning from information security incidents

You learn from incidents and make changes so they do not happen again. What proves it: post-incident reviews with the actions they produced.

A certification auditor samples post-incident reviews and the actions taken. A file that usually does the job: a short post-incident review with the root cause and the tickets raised to fix it.

How to put it in place

Each step leaves a record, and the record is what the auditor samples rather than the step itself. Inside Polara, the control card for A.5.27 walks you through it in this order.

1. After each incident, hold a short review: what happened, why, and what will change.
2. Raise tickets for the changes and track them to done.
3. Feed recurring themes into your risk register.

The free ISO 27001 readiness assessment asks one question that evidences it:

• Do you have an incident response procedure and a log of incidents?

Policies, connectors and the SOC 2 overlap

In the ISO 27001 policy pack, the Information Security Incident Management Policy covers A.5.27. An auditor reads the policy for the rule, then samples the records to see the rule was followed.

The same evidence counts toward SOC 2. The Trust Services criterion that cover this ground: CC7.5, incident recovery.

Organizational controls

A.5.27 is one of the 37 organizational controls in Annex A. How the company runs security: policies, roles, suppliers, incidents, continuity and legal duties. Most of these are written decisions and the records that show you follow them.

Nearby controls in the same theme:

• A.5.24, incident readiness
• A.5.25, triaging security events
• A.5.26, responding to incidents
• A.5.28, collecting evidence
• A.5.29, security during a disruption
• A.5.30, technology continuity

Before it: A.5.26, responding to incidents. After it: A.5.28, collecting evidence. Every control, by theme, is on the Annex A controls page.