ISO 27001:2022 Annex A 8.14 Redundancy of Information Processing Facilities: The Lead Auditor’s Guide.

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ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 Redundancy of Information Processing Facilities

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 is a security control that mandates the implementation of redundancy in information processing facilities to ensure sufficient availability. It requires organizations to identify critical systems and deploy failover mechanisms (such as duplicate servers, network links, or power supplies) to guarantee continuous operation during disruptions and meet defined recovery time objectives.

In this guide, I will show you exactly how to implement ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 and ensure you pass your audit. You will get a complete walkthrough of the control, practical implementation examples, and access to the ISO 27001 templates and toolkit that make compliance easy.

I am Stuart Barker, an ISO 27001 Lead Auditor with over 30 years of experience conducting hundreds of audits. I will cut through the jargon to show you exactly what changed in the 2022 update and provide you with plain-English advice to get you certified.

Key Takeaways: ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 Redundancy of Information Processing Facilities

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 requires organizations to implement redundancy in their IT systems to ensure they remain operational during a failure. It’s not just about “having a backup”; it’s about having standby hardware, software, or network connections that can take over immediately if the primary system fails. The goal is to meet the availability requirements defined by the business.

Core requirements for compliance include:

  • Eliminate Single Points of Failure (SPOF): You must identify any single component that, if it fails, would take down your entire service (e.g., a single internet line, one power supply, or a single database server).
  • Technical Duplication: Depending on your risk, this may include dual power supplies, mirrored databases, load balancers, or redundant internet service providers (ISPs).
  • Automatic vs. Manual Failover: You must define how the system switches to the redundant component. For critical systems, this should be automatic; for less critical ones, a documented manual process is acceptable.
  • Testing: Redundancy is a theory until it is tested. You must regularly simulate a failure (e.g., pulling a power cable or failing over a database) to prove your standby systems actually work.

Audit Focus: Auditors will look for the “Architecture of Resilience”:

  1. SPOF Analysis: “Show me your list of critical systems. Do any of them rely on a single server or internet link?”
  2. Evidence of Uptime: “Show me the report from your last failover test. Did the redundant system take over within the agreed timeframe?”
  3. Cloud Leveraging: If you are in the cloud (AWS/Azure), they will check if you are using “Multi-AZ” (Availability Zones) to ensure redundancy across different physical data centers.

Redundancy Checklist (Audit Prep):

Component Redundancy Method Why it matters
Power Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) / Generators. Prevents crashes during local power cuts.
Internet Dual ISPs (e.g., Fiber + 5G backup). Ensures connectivity if a street cable is cut.
Data Database Clustering / Mirroring. Prevents data loss if a hard drive or server fails.
Cloud Multi-Region / Multi-Zone deployment. Protects against a whole data center outage.

Table of contents

What is ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14?

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 is about redundancy of information processing facilities which means having backup and standby systems in case of an outage.

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 Redundancy of information processing facilities is an ISO 27001 control that requires an organisation to implement information processing facilities with redundancy built in that is sufficient enough to meet availability requirements.

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 Purpose

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 is preventive control that ensures the continuous operation of information processing facilities.

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 Definition

The ISO 27001 standard defines ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 as:

Information processing facilities should be implemented with redundancy sufficient to meet availability

ISO27001:2022 Annex A 8.14 Redundancy of Information Processing Facilities

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 Free Training Video

In the video ISO 27001 Redundancy of Information Processing Facilities Explained – ISO27001:2022 Annex A 8.14 I show you how to implement it and how to pass the audit.

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 Explainer Video

In this beginner’s guide to ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 Redundancy of Information Processing Facilities , ISO 27001 Lead Auditor Stuart Barker and his team talk you through what it is, how to implement in and how to pass the audit. Free ISO 27001 training.

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 Podcast

In this episode: Lead Auditor Stuart Barker and team do a deep dive into the ISO 27001:2022 Annex A 8.14 Redundancy of Information Processing Facilities. The podcast explores what it is, why it is important and the path to compliance.

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 Implementation Guidance

Identify Requirements

Identify what requirements you have for maintaining availability so that you can understand what you need to implement.

The best way to identify the redundancy requirements is to conduct a business impact assessment (BIA). The BIA will identify and prioritise your critical systems and data and will provide you with time scales for how quickly they should be recovered. This in turn will inform your approach to redundancy.

Design and Implement Redundancy

This is where you will need the guidance of your subject matter experts in the technologies that you have. Usually there is an element of duplication that meets redundancy requirements and then implementing the processes and procedures to activate those redundant components.

Implement Alerts

You will want to have alerts in place that notify you when any element that is covered under redundancy fails so that you can respond and run the processes and procedures you have in place to recover.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing allows you various advantages including the the potential to have multiple live versions of information processing facilities, multiple separate physical locations, automatic failover, load balancing and more.  Work with the subject matter experts to see what you can leverage to meet your requirements.

Testing

It goes without saying that you should test and evidence your testing for activating redundancy. This is usually as part of your business continuity and disaster recovery testing.

How to implement ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14

Implementing redundancy for information processing facilities is a critical requirement for ensuring continuous service availability and operational resilience against hardware failures or regional outages. By following these technical implementation steps, your organisation can satisfy ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 requirements and mitigate the risk of single points of failure within your infrastructure.

1. Formalise Availability Requirements and RTO/RPO Metrics

  • Identify all critical business processes and document the required Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) for each.
  • Establish a formal Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to determine the level of redundancy needed (e.g. Active-Active vs Active-Passive) based on risk appetite.
  • Result: A documented technical roadmap that ensures redundancy investments are aligned with business continuity needs.

2. Provision Multi-Zone and Multi-Region Infrastructure

  • Deploy application workloads across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) or distinct geographic regions to protect against localised data centre failures.
  • Utilise Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) peering or dedicated interconnects to ensure low-latency synchronisation between redundant processing nodes.
  • Result: Increased fault tolerance by eliminating geographic single points of failure for critical information systems.

3. Implement Hardware and Network Redundancy

  • Provision redundant hardware components, including dual power supplies, RAID configurations for storage, and multiple Network Interface Cards (NICs).
  • Configure diverse network paths via different Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to maintain connectivity during external infrastructure outages.
  • Result: Enhanced physical resilience that allows individual component failures to occur without impacting overall service delivery.

4. Configure Automated Load Balancing and Failover

  • Deploy Application Load Balancers (ALB) to distribute traffic across redundant server instances and perform continuous health checks.
  • Enable automated failover mechanisms for databases using synchronous replication and Multi-AZ deployments to ensure zero data loss during a switchover.
  • Result: Seamless transition of user traffic to healthy nodes during a failure, maintaining high availability without manual intervention.

5. Restrict Redundancy Management via IAM and MFA

  • Apply the Principle of Least Privilege by assigning specific Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles to administrators managing failover configurations.
  • Mandate Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for any changes to DNS records or load balancer settings to prevent malicious redirection of traffic.
  • Result: Protection of the redundant infrastructure from unauthorised modifications or accidental de-provisioning by privileged users.

6. Execute Regular Redundancy Testing and Audits

  • Formalise a Rules of Engagement (ROE) document for “Chaos Engineering” or failover testing to verify that redundant systems trigger correctly under stress.
  • Conduct quarterly technical audits of synchronisation logs to ensure that data mirrors remain consistent across all redundant processing facilities.
  • Result: Verifiable proof for ISO 27001 auditors that redundancy controls are functional and capable of meeting defined availability targets.

Single Point of Failure (SPOF)

An example checklist for SPOF:

  • Do you have two ISPs?
  • Do servers have dual power supplies?
  • Is there a UPS battery backup?
  • Is the database clustered?

How to comply

To comply with ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 you are going to implement the ‘how’ to the ‘what’ the control is expecting. In short measure you are going to:

  • Understand and record the legal, regulatory and contractual requirements you have for data
  • Conduct a risk assessment
  • Based on the legal, regulatory, contractual requirements and the risk assessment you will implement a redundancy solution
  • Document and implement your processes and technical implementations for redundancy
  • Check that the controls are working by conducting internal audits

What will an auditor check?

The audit is going to check a number of areas. Lets go through the main ones

  • That you have documentation: What this means is that you need to show that you have documented your legal, regulatory and contractual requirements for information and that you have taken this into account when building your information processing facilities redundancy. Where data protection laws exist that you have documented what those laws are and what those  requirements are. That you have an information classification scheme and a topic specific policy for access control and that you have documented your information redundancy taking all of this into account.
  • That you have have implemented redundancy appropriately: They will look at systems to seek evidence of information processing facilities redundancy, testing and recovery. They want to see evidence of tests, the results of tests and any continual improvement you conducted as a result of those tests.
  • That you have conducted internal audits: The audit will want to see that you have tested the controls and evidenced that they are operating. This is usually in the form of the required internal audits. They will check the records and outputs of those internal audits.

Top 3 ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 mistakes and how to avoid them

In my experience, the top 3 mistakes people make for ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 Redundancy of information processing facilities are

  • You have not tested: This is a common mistake we see. That you have not tested that you can recover and activate your redundancy solution. Sometimes you did a recovery test but it was a long time ago, or it was a partial recovery and therefore you have no actual evidence that your redundancy solution can be implemented to a point the organisation is operational again within the time frames and to the point in time that was agreed.
  • You don’t know your legal obligations: This is a massive mistake that we see, where people assume ISO 27001 is just information security and forget that it also checks that appropriate laws are being followed, and in particular data protection laws. Cost saving by not having a data protection expert or ignoring data protection law entirely is a common mistake we see people make when cutting corners and saving costs. Duplicating data and having redundancy, in particular personal information, can get you in a lot of hot water depending how you implement it.
  • Your document and version control is wrong: Keeping your document version control up to date, making sure that version numbers match where used, having a review evidenced in the last 12 months, having documents that have no comments in are all good practices.

Applicability of ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 across different business models.

Business Type Applicability Examples of Control Implementation
Small Businesses Focuses on protecting physical office operations and basic internet connectivity. The goal is to ensure that a single hardware failure or power cut doesn’t stop the business from operating.
  • Implementing a secondary 5G/LTE failover router to maintain internet access if the primary fibre line is cut.
  • Using an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) for the main office server and network switch to prevent data corruption during power surges.
  • Ensuring all critical staff have company-issued laptops with cellular data capabilities to work from home if the office is inaccessible.
Tech Startups Fundamental for maintaining customer-facing service availability. Compliance involves leveraging cloud-native features to automate failover and ensure 99.9%+ uptime.
  • Deploying application workloads across multiple “Availability Zones” (Multi-AZ) in AWS or Azure to protect against data centre outages.
  • Configuring automated load balancers to redirect traffic away from unhealthy server instances in real-time.
  • Using synchronous database replication to ensure a standby database is ready to take over immediately with zero data loss.
AI Companies Vital for high-performance computing (HPC) and data ingestion. Focus is on ensuring that massive model training jobs aren’t lost due to single-node failures.
  • Implementing “Checkpointing” in long-running AI training jobs to allow progress to be resumed from a redundant storage node after a crash.
  • Provisioning redundant GPU clusters or “Spot Instance” failover strategies to maintain training velocity during regional capacity issues.
  • Ensuring multi-region redundancy for the proprietary training datasets to prevent accidental loss or corruption of high-value IP.

Fast Track ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 Compliance with the ISO 27001 Toolkit

For ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 (Redundancy of information processing facilities), the requirement is to ensure continuous operation by having backup and standby systems in place. While SaaS platforms often try to sell you “continuous availability tracking” or complex failover monitoring, the auditor is primarily looking for your governance framework: the Business Impact Analysis (BIA), redundancy policies, and evidence of testing.

Compliance Factor SaaS Availability Modules High Table ISO 27001 Toolkit Audit Evidence Example
Strategy Ownership Rents access to your BIA and continuity plans via a proprietary web interface. Permanent Assets: You receive the Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and Redundancy Policy to keep forever. A localized BIA report identifying RTO/RPO requirements stored on your secure internal drive.
Implementation Over-engineers compliance with complex dashboards that often duplicate existing cloud monitoring. Strategy-First: Formalizes technical work (e.g., AWS Multi-AZ) with auditor-ready documentation. A redundancy test report proving a successful failover between primary and standby systems.
Cost Structure Charges an “Availability Tax” based on the number of critical assets or integrations monitored. One-Off Fee: A single payment covers your redundancy governance for one server or a global estate. Allocating budget to redundant hardware/dual ISPs instead of paying a monthly “paperwork” fee.
Infrastructure Freedom Mandates specific connectors that may not support hybrid cloud or specialized legacy setups. Tech-Agnostic: Procedures match any setup, from load balancers and UPS backups to hot-standby sites. Tailored procedures that reflect your unique mix of on-premise UPS and cloud-native auto-scaling.

Summary: For Annex A 8.14, the auditor wants to see that you have a plan for redundancy and that it is tested. The High Table ISO 27001 Toolkit provides the governance framework to do exactly that. It is the most direct, cost-effective way to prove system resilience with permanent documentation that you own and control.

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 FAQ

   
   

What is ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 Redundancy of Information Processing Facilities?

   
     

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 is a preventive control that requires organizations to implement duplicate or standby components to ensure critical IT systems remain operational during a failure. Its primary goal is to eliminate Single Points of Failure (SPOF) to meet the availability targets defined by the business.

     
           
  • Focus: System availability and uptime (not just data preservation).
    •        
  • Mechanism: Automatic or manual failover to secondary hardware/software.
    •        
  • Requirement: Redundancy must be sufficient to meet the results of your Business Impact Analysis (BIA).
    •      
   
 
 
   

What is the difference between Redundancy (8.14) and Information Backup (8.13)?

   
     

Redundancy ensures real-time business continuity, while Backup ensures data recovery after a catastrophic loss. While they are complementary, they serve different functions in an ISMS.

     
           
  • Redundancy (Annex A 8.14): Keeps systems running during an incident (e.g., a secondary server takes over immediately if the primary fails).
    •        
  • Backup (Annex A 8.13): Restores data after an incident (e.g., restoring a database from last night’s copy after corruption).
    •        
  • Speed: Redundancy offers near-zero downtime; Backups have a Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
    •      
   
 
 
   

Does ISO 27001 require full redundancy for every system?

   
     

No, redundancy is only required for information processing facilities where availability is critical to the organization. The standard explicitly states redundancy must be “sufficient to meet availability requirements.”

     
           
  • Step 1: Conduct a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to identify critical assets.
    •        
  • Step 2: Assign redundancy only to systems with a low tolerance for downtime.
    •        
  • Cost-Efficiency: You do not need expensive active-active clusters for non-critical internal tools.
    •      
   
 
 
   

What are common examples of technical redundancy?

   
     

Common examples include duplicating power, network connectivity, and storage hardware to prevent a single failure from stopping operations. Implementation varies based on whether you are on-premise or cloud-based.

     
           
  • Power: Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) and backup generators.
    •        
  • Network: Dual Internet Service Providers (ISPs) entering the building via different physical routes.
    •        
  • Compute: Load balancers distributing traffic across multiple servers.
    •        
  • Storage: RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) or mirrored databases.
    •      
   
 
 
   

How does Cloud Computing impact Annex A 8.14 compliance?

   
     

Cloud computing simplifies compliance by offering built-in redundancy features, but the responsibility remains with the organization to configure them correctly. Simply moving to the cloud does not guarantee redundancy.

     
           
  • Availability Zones (AZ): You must configure services to run across multiple physical data centers (Multi-AZ) within a region.
    •        
  • Geo-Redundancy: For high-risk systems, replicate data across different geographic regions.
    •        
  • SLA Gaps: Review your provider’s Service Level Agreement (SLA) to ensure their guaranteed uptime matches your business needs.
    •        
   
 
 
   

What evidence will an ISO 27001 auditor check for redundancy?

   
     

Auditors primarily check for evidence of testing and architectural design that aligns with your risk assessment. They want to prove that your redundancy is functional, not just theoretical.

     
           
  • Test Records: Logs showing regular failover tests (e.g., simulating a power cut or server crash).
    •        
  • Architecture Diagrams: Documentation clearly marking removed Single Points of Failure (SPOF).
    •        
  • BIA Alignment: Evidence that the level of redundancy implemented matches the criticality defined in your Business Impact Analysis.
    •      
   
 
 
   

Is testing mandatory for Annex A 8.14?

   
     

Yes, untested redundancy is viewed as non-compliant because there is no assurance it will work when needed. Testing ensures that failover mechanisms trigger correctly and within the required timeframes.

     
           
  • Frequency: Test annually or after significant infrastructure changes.
    •        
  • Types of Tests: Tabletop exercises, live failover drills, and restoration tests.
    •        
  • Record Keeping: Always document the outcome of the test and any remedial actions taken if the failover failed.
    •      
   
 
Stuart Barker
🎓 MSc Security 🛡️ Lead Auditor ⚡ 30+ Years Exp 🏢 Ex-GE Leader

Stuart Barker

Stuart Barker is a veteran practitioner with over 30 years of experience in systems security and risk management. Holding an MSc in Software and Systems Security, he combines academic rigor with extensive operational experience, including a decade leading Data Governance for General Electric (GE).

As a qualified ISO 27001 Lead Auditor, Stuart possesses distinct insight into the specific evidence standards required by certification bodies. His toolkits represent an auditor-verified methodology designed to minimise operational friction while guaranteeing compliance.

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