Implementing ISO 27001 will help you achieve some or all of the following business benefits:
- Compliance – ISO 27001 provides you with the framework that helps you comply with the relevant regulations regarding data protection, privacy, and IT governance, as well as your contractual obligations like various security clauses or service-level agreements.
- Increased revenues – ISO 27001 provides you with a marketing edge by helping you differentiate from your competitors. This standard could be a unique selling point, especially if you handle clients’ sensitive information and if you have a certificate that your competitors do not.
- Lowering expenses – Information security is usually considered a cost with no obvious financial gain. However, each incident costs you money – for example, if your operations are disrupted or if you have a leakage of sensitive data, you will have to pay quite a lot of money to resolve these incidents. However, preventing such incidents by implementing an ISMS is much cheaper, and you can use this argument to present the return on security investment to your executives.
- Better organization – ISO 27001 helps you better organize your business by defining responsibilities and procedures. If you are a company that has been growing rapidly for the last couple of years, you might experience problems like who has to decide what, who is responsible for what, who has to authorize access to information systems, etc. ISO 27001 is particularly good at sorting these things out – it will force you to define very precisely both the responsibilities and processes, and thereby strengthen your internal organization.