Information security policy elaboration with mind map

Information security policy as a global set of documents and measures to regulate organization activities and ensure its’ safety. This set of documents has a complicated structure and intercommunications between documents but it should be integral and actual at every time line. Mind maps should be used to manage this complication. And Mind Pad gives an opportunity to specify your map.

• Important notice: Features and functions described on this page are for Mind Pad 2, the latest version of Mind Pad was released as a new major update (actually completely new project), so information on this page will be relevant only to Mind Pad 2, which is available for download, but is not supported.

Information security policy structure

First of all, you should know that there are many different approaches to create ISP. We will consider the most global variant when ISP describes all of organization activity aspects connected with providing information security.

Our ISP will consist of 4 main parts: Common Regulations, Security Standards, Organization Security and Emergency Plan.

Click to see big image of contact map

Common Regulations devoted to defining such things as Security Targets, Law References, Applying Borders and ISP structure.

Security Standards define Confidential Information Categorization, Statement of Responsibility, Terms and Definitions, Order of Confidential Information Using and so on.

Organization Security is the main part and consist of 3 big and complicated chapters: Application-Specific Procedures, Organizational Procedures and Security Instruments Using.

Emergency Plan consist of emergency situations defining, priority placing, prior measures, emergency arrangements and recovery plan.

All documents in ISP have an addressing property. Some docs are common for everyone, some should be

Information security policy mind map

To get the best result you should use Mind Pad enhancement. In our ISP structure we have common documents, which should be available for all, for-user documents and administer documents. Users don’t have access to administer documents. Another division of documents is regulations (with such properties as goal, access, borders and subject), standards (application area, access) and instructions (access, subject), and ISP PART (part name and description). So, we should create 4 new objects in Model Editor. Model Editor allows to create class of frame objects with new properties. In simpler words it means that you can add more properties to standard frames and use new frames on your work-space.

So, we will have such new frames:

• regulation

• standard

• instruction

• ISP PART

For regulations we will specify such category property values as application-specific procedure, organizational procedure and security instruments using.

For access property we will specify such values as: common, user and administrator.

Now we can create a mind map of ISP in Mind Pad. Central topic is default frame called ISP. Subtopics are ISP PARTS linked to ISP with names: Common Regulations, Security Standards, Organization Security and Emergency Plan. Each ISP PART connected with its regulations and standards and regulations are connected with instructions. Access property specified for each frame. That is the main scheme of ISP mind map.

As a tall structure it will looks like the map designed in Mind Pad (click to see the picture).

Of course, it is just an example, and you should elaborate this model according to your organization specific.

Information security policy support

To support ISP and keep it in an actual state we can link frames with concrete document source, for example in Microsoft Word. So, now we have an ISP specific workspace, we can see the whole structure of document set, we know all access rights to each document and we can get each document directly from the map using hyperlinks.

Such approach is very comfortable, because ISP may consist of about 100 different documents and IT security specialist must keep all this with its complicity and interconnections in his mind. For example, Organization Security-> Organizational Procedures branch may have such subtopics as Software Installation Order, Physical Access Order, Devices and Equipment Using Order, Access Regulation and so on.

Mind Pad provides all needed instruments and opportunities to create complete information security policy workspace. You also can use notes to mark documents, for example, to specify its stage of development.

Sample maps

Information Security Policy This is a sample of security policy map created in Mind Pad.  Download Security Policy [11 KB]

Specials

• For creating security policy mind map purpose, you can purchase Mind Pad with special pricing 49$. Purchase now.

Map as a text

We have generated a report for this map using Mind Pad. Here is the result:

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