Standard of Good Practice

The "Standard of Good Practice" (SoGP) is a detailed documentation of best practice for information security. First released in 1996, the Standard is published and revised biannually by the Information Security Forum (ISF), an international best-practices association consisting of member organizations in financial services, manufacturing, consumer products, telecommunications, government, and other areas. The Standard is available free of charge for non-commercial use from the ISF, whereas other ISF reports and tools are generally available only to member organizations.

The Standard is developed from research and the actual practices of and incidents experienced by major organizations, incorporating the ISF's extensive research program, comprehensive benchmarking program, analysis of other standards and prevailing practices, and the direct feedback from and active involvement of ISF members. Its regular and relatively frequent update cycle (every two years) also allows it to keep up with technological developments and emerging threats. The Standard is used as the default governing document for information security behavior by many major organizations, by itself or in conjunction with other standards such as ISO/IEC 27002 or COBIT.

The Standard was updated most recently in February 2007 to include a new addition focusing on end-user environments. It also includes expanded sections on application security, risk assessment, and other subjects and new sections addressing regulatory compliance and evolving security issues arising out of the ISF's best-practices research and recommendations.

Organization

The Standard is broken into six categories, or "aspects". Computer Installations and Networks address the underlying IT infrastructure on which Critical Business Applications run. The End-User Environment covers the arrangements associated with protecting corporate and workstation applications at the endpoint in use by individuals. Systems Development deals with how new applications and systems are created, and Security Management addresses high-level direction and control.

The six aspects within the Standard are composed of a number of "areas", each covering a specific topic. An area is broken down further into "sections", each of which contains detailed specifications of information security best practice. Each statement has a unique reference. For example, SM41.2 indicates that a specification is in the Security Management aspect, area 4, section 1, and is listed as specification #2 within that section.

The Principles and Objectives part of the Standard provides a high-level version of the Standard, by bringing together just the "principles" (which provide an overview of what needs to be performed to meet the Standard) and "objectives" (which outline the reason why these actions are necessary) for each section.

The published Standard also includes an extensive topics matrix, index, introductory material, background information, suggestions for implementation, and other information.

ee also

"See for a list of all computing and information-security related articles".
* Best practice
*COBIT
*Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO)
*Cyber security standards
* Information security
*Information Security Forum
*ISO 17799
*ISO/IEC 27002
*Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)

External links

* [http://www.isfstandard.com The Standard of Good Practice]
*The [http://www.securityforum.org Information Security Forum]