ISO 27001 Clause 7.3 Awareness – Ultimate Certification Guide

In this article we lay bare ISO 27001 Clause 7.3 Awareness. Exposing the insider trade secrets, giving you the templates that will save you hours of your life and showing you exactly what you need to do to satisfy it for ISO 27001 certification. I show you exactly what changed in the ISO 27001:2022 update.

I am Stuart Barker the ISO 27001 Ninja and this is ISO 27001 Clause 7.3

What is ISO 27001 Clause 7.3?

ISO 27001 Clause 7.3 Awareness is communicating and making people aware of the information security policy, how they contribute to information security and the consequences of not conforming to information security.

The ISO 27001 standard for ISO 27001 certification wants you to let people know what you expect, educate them and have processes in place for if things go wrong. It is one of the ISO 27001 controls.

What are the ISO 27001:2022 Changes to Clause 7.3?

Great news. There are no changes to ISO 27001 Clause 7.3 in the 2022 update.

ISO 27001 Clause 7.3 Definition

The ISO 27001 Standard defines clause 7.3 as:

Persons doing work under the organisation’s control shall be aware of:
a) the information security policy;
b) their contribution to the effectiveness of the information security management system, including the benefits of improved information security performance; and
c) the implications of not conforming with the information security management system requirements.

ISO 27001 Clause 7.3 Awareness

ISO 27001 Clause 7.3 Implementation Guide 

There are distinct phases in the journey of staff, contractors and third parties.

Each of those phases potentially requires a different level of communication.

It is possible that one approach will work but the likelihood is you are going to have different communication styles and approaches depending on the ‘who’ and the ‘where’ they are in their journey with you.

Onboarding: Include copies of policies and the employee handbook as part of onboarding. Arrange a dedicated face to face session to explain the information security approach of the business, where the policies are, who is responsible for information security, how to raise a security incident. Cover how their role contributes to information security and what is required of them. Enrol them on the general information security awareness training and basic GDRP / Data Protection training if you use a training tool or do it face to face and get them to sign that they attended and understood.

Throughout the Year: plan you training and awareness throughout the year based on risk and business need. As well as the information security and data protection training perhaps people need educating on the risks of home working. Or perhaps on the perils of phishing attacks. The process of awareness should be on going.

Annually: Conduct the general information security awareness training and the general data protection training at least annually. Even it is just a refresher people should formally go through basic training once a year.

On Ending Employment / Engagement: Ensure that at the end of employment or the end of engagement that you communicate the contractual obligations that are, and will remain, in play in regards to information security.

ISO 27001 Continual Improvement: continually update your training and your awareness program to respond to known threats, risks and issues.

ISO 27001 Clause 7.3 Awareness and Training

In this day and age one of the few times we would recommend the use of a tool is for information security training.

These come with courses pre built in and allow for the automation of many of the required tasks around awareness.

Scheduling the awareness and verifying understanding is a must have as well as the ability to report.

These tools will refresh content annually which saves you time and effort and will include popular modules for topics that are likely to be relevant to you.

Being online they can be taken by staff from anywhere.

These are not the only ways to raise and manage awareness but they do the lions share of the work.

Of course you will want to consider your company culture and supplement this. Emails are great but also standup meetings, have presentations at company meetings, perhaps bringing outside resource. There is no one size fits all answer but training tools go a long way for those that are time poor and just want to get the job done and move on.

How do you demonstrate compliance to ISO 27001 clause 7.3?

The easiest ways is to have a training tool that records people’s understanding by presenting with training and what you want them to be aware of and then has them take a test which you can report.

Having a communication plan that records what you communicated, when, to whom and the evidence that you did is also part of showing compliance to the clause.

There is a place for the signing of policies to accept them and the way you do this can be via traditional signature (which is clunky but doable), electronic signature, or an email to you that they have read and accept them. There are many ways to skin a cat.

ISO 27001 Clause 7.3 Templates

ISO 27001 templates are a great way to implement your information security management system. Whilst an ISO 27001 Toolkit can save you up to 30x in consulting fees and allow you to deliver up to 10x faster these individual templates help meet the specific requirements of ISO 27001 clause 7.3

ISO 27001 Clause 7.3 FAQ

Reference

ISO/IEC 27001 Information Security Management