The Definitive Governance Requirement.
Clause 9.1 mandates that you evaluate the information security performance and the effectiveness of the information security management system. It requires a shift from “deploying controls” to “proving they work.” You cannot improve what you do not measure.
The Mandate
The standard demands data, not anecdotes. You must define a measurement framework that answers two questions: Is the control running? and Is the control effective?
You must legally define:
- What to measure: (e.g., Failed login attempts, patching latency, risk treatment progress).
- How to measure: The method must be comparable and reproducible.
- When to measure: The frequency (e.g., Real-time logs vs. Monthly reports).
- When to analyze: Collecting data is useless if you do not interpret it. You must define when the results are evaluated.
- Who is responsible: Who looks at the dashboard?
The Verdict: A firewall generating logs that nobody reads is not a security control; it is a waste of hard drive space. You must prove analysis.
The Implementation Strategy
Do not drown in data. Focus on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that actually drive decision-making.
- Select Meaningful Metrics: Avoid “Vanity Metrics” (e.g., “Number of emails sent”). Choose “Effectiveness Metrics” (e.g., “Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) an incident” or “Percentage of staff who failed the phishing simulation”).
- Establish the Baseline: You cannot measure improvement if you don’t know where you started.
- The Reporting Cadence: Automate the collection. If a human has to manually count tickets every month, the process will fail. Use SIEM tools or automated dashboards.
- The Analysis Meeting: Schedule a recurring meeting (monthly/quarterly) specifically to review these metrics. The minutes of this meeting are your evidence of “Evaluation.”
The Auditor’s Trap
[The Auditor’s View] The most common Major Non-Conformance here is “The Data Graveyard.” I often see organizations with Terabytes of Splunk logs, but when I ask, “Show me the trend analysis for failed logins over the last 6 months,” they can’t produce it. If you collect data but don’t analyze it, you have failed Clause 9.1. You are flying blind.
Required Evidence
An auditor wants to see the decision-making process derived from the data.
- Metrics / KPI Dashboard: Visual representation of security performance.
- Evaluation Reports: Monthly or Quarterly reports summarizing the data.
- Log Reviews: Evidence that someone actually checked the logs (e.g., a signed log review checklist or ticket).
- Incident Trends: Analysis showing whether security incidents are increasing or decreasing.
Strategic Acceleration
Building a KPI framework from scratch takes weeks of calibration. Most organizations measure the wrong things.
The Hightable™ KPI Dashboard comes pre-loaded with the standard ISO 27001 metrics required to prove effectiveness. It provides the “Health Check” your ISMS needs without the manual overhead.
The Next Move: Deploy the KPI Dashboard