ISO 27001 A.5.29: security during a disruption, explained for startups
What A.5.29 asks of a small company, and what an auditor samples.
Keep protecting information even when the business is hit by a major disruption. Plan how to maintain a suitable level of security while you recover.
Why it exists: to keep information protected during an outage or disruption.
A.5.29 Information security during disruption
Security keeps working during an outage or disruption. What proves it: a plan that keeps security in place during a disruption, and a record that it was tested or reviewed.
A certification auditor samples continuity plan and exercise records. A file that usually does the job: the business continuity policy plus notes from an exercise such as a cloud region outage.
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.5.29 walks you through it in this order.
- Approve the business continuity policy in Policies.
- Run a one hour exercise on a likely disruption and keep the notes.
- Fix what the exercise showed and review the plan once a year.
The free ISO 27001 readiness assessment asks one question that evidences it:
- Have you set a recovery time objective (RTO) and a recovery point objective (RPO), and tested them?
Policies, connectors and the SOC 2 overlap
In the ISO 27001 policy pack, the Business Continuity and ICT Readiness Policy covers A.5.29. 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 criteria that cover this ground: CC7.5, incident recovery and CC9.1, disruption risk.
Organizational controls
A.5.29 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.5.26, responding to incidents
- A.5.27, learning from incidents
- A.5.28, collecting evidence
- A.5.30, technology continuity
- A.5.31, legal and contract duties
- A.5.32, intellectual property
Before it: A.5.28, collecting evidence. After it: A.5.30, technology continuity. Every control, by theme, is on the Annex A controls page.
Questions
What does ISO 27001 A.5.29 require?
What evidence does an auditor want for A.5.29?
Get ready for ISO 27001 certification.
The readiness assessment is free, with no payment and no card. ISO 27001 is part of Constellation, at $10,800 a year: everything in Orbit plus the management system, the policies, the evidence and the management review for ISO 27001, and your SOC 2 Type 2 audit is included in every contract year. You contract the certification body directly.
The internal audit is priced separately: Polara arranges it with an independent internal auditor from our partner network who works in the platform, and quotes it for your company.
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