ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 Redundancy of information processing facilities

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What is ISO 27001 Redundancy of information processing facilities?

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.

Purpose

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

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

Implementation Guide

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.

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.30 ICT Readiness for business continuity

ISO 27001 Templates

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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 Mistakes People Make

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.

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.

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ISO 27001:2022 requirements

ISO 27001:2022 Annex A 5 - Organisational Controls

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.1 Policies for information security

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.2 Information Security Roles and Responsibilities

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.3 Segregation of duties

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.4 Management responsibilities

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.5 Contact with authorities

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.6 Contact with special interest groups

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.7 Threat intelligence – new

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.8 Information security in project management

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.9 Inventory of information and other associated assets – change

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.10 Acceptable use of information and other associated assets – change

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.11 Return of assets

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.11 Return of assets

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.13 Labelling of information

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.14 Information transfer

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.15 Access control

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.16 Identity management

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.17 Authentication information – new

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.18 Access rights – change

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.19 Information security in supplier relationships

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.20 Addressing information security within supplier agreements

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.21 Managing information security in the ICT supply chain – new

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.22 Monitoring, review and change management of supplier services – change

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.23 Information security for use of cloud services – new

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.24 Information security incident management planning and preparation – change

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.25 Assessment and decision on information security events 

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.26 Response to information security incidents

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.27 Learning from information security incidents

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.28 Collection of evidence

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.29 Information security during disruption – change

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.31 Identification of legal, statutory, regulatory and contractual requirements

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.32 Intellectual property rights

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.33 Protection of records

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.34 Privacy and protection of PII

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.35 Independent review of information security

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.36 Compliance with policies and standards for information security

ISO 27001 Annex A 5.37 Documented operating procedures 

ISO 27001:2022 Annex A 8 - Technology Controls

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.1 User Endpoint Devices

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.2 Privileged Access Rights

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.3 Information Access Restriction

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.4 Access To Source Code

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.5 Secure Authentication

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.6 Capacity Management

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.7 Protection Against Malware

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.8 Management of Technical Vulnerabilities

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.9 Configuration Management 

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.10 Information Deletion

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.11 Data Masking

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.12 Data Leakage Prevention

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.13 Information Backup

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.14 Redundancy of Information Processing Facilities

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.15 Logging

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.16 Monitoring Activities

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.17 Clock Synchronisation

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.18 Use of Privileged Utility Programs

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.19 Installation of Software on Operational Systems

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.20 Network Security

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.21 Security of Network Services

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.22 Segregation of Networks

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.23 Web Filtering

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.24 Use of CryptographyISO27001 Annex A 8.25 Secure Development Life Cycle

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.26 Application Security Requirements

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.27 Secure Systems Architecture and Engineering Principles

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.28 Secure Coding

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.29 Security Testing in Development and Acceptance

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.30 Outsourced Development

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.31 Separation of Development, Test and Production Environments

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.32 Change Management

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.33 Test Information

ISO 27001 Annex A 8.34 Protection of information systems during audit testing