ISO 27001 A.5.36: checking policy compliance, explained for startups
What A.5.36 asks of a small company, and what an auditor samples.
Regularly confirm that people and systems are actually following your security policies and standards. Check for drift and fix any gaps you find.
Why it exists: to confirm that its security rules are followed in practice.
A.5.36 Compliance with policies, rules and standards for information security
You check that the security rules are actually followed. What proves it: regular checks that staff and systems follow your policies, with the results and fixes.
A certification auditor samples compliance checks and their results. A file that usually does the job: a quarterly checklist of policy checks with results, or a configuration compliance report from your cloud provider.
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.5.36 walks you through it in this order.
- Pick a few checks each quarter, for example multi-factor authentication coverage, device encryption and access reviews done on time.
- Record the results and fix what fails.
- Bring repeat failures to management review.
No question in the readiness assessment covers A.5.36 directly, so the control card is its whole evidence path.
Policies, connectors and the SOC 2 overlap
In the ISO 27001 policy pack, the Information Security Policy covers A.5.36. 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: CC4.1, control monitoring and CC5.3, policies and procedures.
Organizational controls
A.5.36 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.5.33, protecting records
- A.5.34, personal data protection
- A.5.35, independent security review
- A.5.37, written procedures
Before it: A.5.35, independent security review. After it: A.5.37, written procedures. Every control, by theme, is on the Annex A controls page.
Questions
What does ISO 27001 A.5.36 require?
What evidence does an auditor want for A.5.36?
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.
Take the free assessmentPolara Labs is not a certification body. Certification audits are performed by independent accredited certification bodies.