IS Policies - ISO27001

Data is becoming the biggest and most important asset that any company has, and it's important to ensure that your company data is properly managed. From an IT perspective, this can be managed through an Information Security Management System, according to ISO:27001. This International Standard is a great reference when putting controls in place, or mapping what controls you already have to industry standards.

We started this process by performing a GAP analysis - going through the ISO standard and mapping what controls, polices, procedures and processes we already had in place. We found that most of what we had didn't quite cover everything we had expected it to do. There was also a lot of controls in the Standard that we hadn't addressed.

Our next step was to update all of the policies we had to make sure that they did address all of the controls that they were designed for. We were able to amalgamate a lot of them and expand the ones we had left so that by the end we had fewer, but more detailed policies. We collated them all in a single handbook and then created an index spreadsheet that listed all of the policies, the owners, dates for review, changes etc. so that we had a quick reference document.

Once this handbook had been compiled, we went back to the ISO Standard and looked at the areas we had not yet addressed. Some more policies were created and added to the handbook. We also looked at all our our procedures and processes - standardised them all and if applicable we merged them into policies, or added them as appendices in a standardised format.

Once this had been all been done, we split the book into different sections and published them to the different areas of the company. One for the General Staff, consisting of all policies that applied to everyone; one to the HR department that covered... you guessed it, HR Policies; one to our internal IT staff that was pretty comprehensive and covered all of our controls, polices, procedures and processes; and the final section was published to suppliers and 3rd parties that we work with, consisting of policies in relation to SLAs, contracts and other external procedures that we had in place.

We review this ISMS every year at a minimum to make sure that the policies and controls still apply to us and our current use of technology. It has given the staff, management and IT team a lot more confidence in our security and controls and we follow these religiously.

The above description is a very, very brief outline of the work we carried out, which took several months to complete. It is a huge commitment and takes a very large amount of resourcing, but once in place and part of the culture, helps to increase your security posture and gives your company and others confidence in how you process and store your data.

Server 2008 R2 - server starts up but can't log in or use resources

Monday morning after a week off and surprise surprise, a call at 6am to say the system is down!

All servers are working - apart from one. The one that stores the user profiles (we discovered that our fail-over wasn't working, that blog will come later!). At the console we're met with the Ctrl+Alt+Del screen and are able to enter our credentials. We tried both domain and local users, but couldn't get further than either Please wait for the User Profile Service with the domain account or Loading Windows Personalisation with the local account. Luckily, with the local account, we could hit Ctrl+Alt+Del and bring up the Task manager.

With the Task Manager open you can select Services and see which services had started correctly and which ones were still in the Starting phase. For us, the Citrix MFCOM and IMA services were still Starting and gave us some clues as to what was happening. Cue a Safe Mode with networking restart and we were able to log in with the local account.

When we opened the Services.msc console we could see that since the last restart, the two services for Citrix mentioned above were now trying to log in with our Backup Exec account. A quick check on the other Citrix servers and we could see that it should be using the Network account. using the log on tab in the services properties, we were able to switch back to using the Network account.
*Quick Note* To change back to the Network account, open the service's Properties, choose the log on tab, click Browse and type in Network, then hit Enter - this will automatically change the account to Network. Remove the password in the boxes below this and Apply and close the properties box.

Complete this for both services and Restart the server. Hey Presto! Server and resources now work. All that's left is to investigate what (or WHO!) switched the log on account from Network to Backup Exec!