ISO/IEC 27001:2022·Annex A A.5.24·medium·Component: Organizational controls

What this control requires

The organization shall plan and prepare for managing information security incidents by defining, establishing and communicating information security incident management processes, roles and responsibilities.
— ISO/IEC 27001:2022, Annex A A.5.24

In plain English

The organization shall plan and prepare for managing information security incidents by defining, establishing and communicating information security incident management processes, roles and responsibilities. In practice, this means you can prove you policy information security-level controls on a defined cadence.

Why it matters

ISO 27001 certification depends on showing each Annex A control is either implemented or explicitly justified for exclusion in the Statement of Applicability (SoA). Certification bodies sample controls during surveillance audits, and a missing SoA entry — or implementation that doesn't match the SoA wording — is a finding.

What an auditor looks for

An ISO 27001 lead auditor looks for: (1) an SoA entry covering the control with justification, (2) a documented procedure or policy implementing it, (3) records that prove the procedure runs (logs, tickets, training records) and (4) management-review evidence that effectiveness is monitored.

Within Organizational controls, the assessor will trace your implementation back to the catalogue reference (Annex A A.5.24) and look for objective evidence on the latest two assessment cycles.

How to implement

Incident Response

Runbook. Maintain a runbook keyed by incident type with named roles (IC, comms, scribe), an out-of-band comms channel, and a 72-hour timeline for external notification.

Tabletop. Run a quarterly tabletop exercise (ransomware, insider, supply-chain) and feed gaps back into the runbook.

Policy Management

Docs. Keep each policy in version-controlled Markdown alongside the code that implements it; ship a signed PDF snapshot at each annual review and link the SHA into the SoA.

Operational checklist

  • Policy. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
  • Information. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
  • Management. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
  • Response. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
  • Security. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
  • Scope: information security, management, information security incidents.

Evidence to collect

  • Policy Document. A signed and version-controlled policy / standard / procedure document.

Signed policy or standard documents the safeguard. Focus: Information security incident management planning and preparation.

Common pitfalls

  • Runbooks that name a role but no person, or list a paging channel that no longer exists.
  • Policies that no engineer has read; the version in Confluence drifts from the version that's actually being enforced.

How it maps to other frameworks

Computed from shared tags, control component and key-operation subjects — handy when you are reconciling controls across an audit.

Related controls in ISO/IEC 27001:2022

References

Topics: governance riskincident responsepolicy management