The Similarity between ISO 9001 and BS 7799-2

The Similarity between ISO 9001 and BS 7799-2
BS 7799-2:2002 is a specification for an Information Security Management System (ISMS). It is shortly to be upgraded to the status of a full
International Standard, and published as ISO/IEC 27001. The normative part of this standard has four sections and an annex . The requirements of the four sections are associated with the PDCA cycle. The annex defines all the controls that must be considered for generating the SOA. Thus the structure of BS 7799-2:2002, as will be ISO/IEC 27001, can be simply described as:
A PDCA framework;
An SOA.
ISO 9001:2000 is a specification for a Quality Management System (QMS). The normative part of this standard has five normative sections,
numbered 4 – 8. All of these requirements must be met in order to claim conformance with the standard, save for section 7 (Product Realisation),
where the standard states in paragraph 1.2 “Where exclusions are made, claims of conformity to this International Standard are not acceptable unless
these exclusions are limited to requirements within clause 7, an such exclusions do not affect the organisation’s ability, or responsibility, to provide
product that meets customer and applicable regulatory requirements”.
In Table 2 we relate the requirements of sections 4, 5, 6 and 8 to the PDCA framework. We treat section 7 as an SOA.
The BS 7799-2:2002 standard gives instruction on how the controls documented in BS 7799-2 Annex A are to be determined as being applicable or nonapplicable. In particular, if the control is applicable it must be justified in terms of the results of a risk assessment.
The controls listed in Section 7 of ISO 9001 may be excluded with justification. Thus, Section 7 of ISO 9001 may be treated in exactly the same manner as BS 7799-2 Annex A provided that applicable quality controls are also justified by
reference to a risk assessment. Conversely for an integrated MS, information security controls that are declared to be non-applicable should also be
justified as not applicable by reference to a risk assessment, in order to bring the two standards into line. Interestingly, this requirement was present in
BS 7799-2:1999 but was dropped in the 2002 revision.
The amalgamation of these two approaches in an integrated MS should not be seen as a disadvantage. The justification of non-applicable information security controls greatly simplifies the task of determining, given a change of threat or
business practice, whether a non-applicable control has now become applicable. The justification of Product Realisation controls by way of a reference to a risk assessment serves to remind us that, for many organisations, quality controls are not uniform across the whole organisation but are commensurate with the degree of risk involved.
For example, in the software business, a fixed price assignment with tight timescales to produce a bespoke software system has a greater risk than a
time and materials contract to supply programming staff, and the quality controls applied to management planning and reporting of the two projects would be very different.