ISO 27001 For SaaS Businesses: A Starter’s Guide

ISO 27001 is a well-established and recognized cybersecurity certification. It provides companies (and SaaS businesses) comprehensive guidelines on creating, implementing, and improving their Information Security Management System (ISMS). 

For SaaS businesses that have a majority of their data on the cloud, the standard is more than a certification that gets them in the room. It’s a badge of honor that helps them build customer trust, showcase operational maturity, and enable growth. 

With the evolution of the cyber threat landscape, ISO 27001 has become an invaluable cornerstone that guides them toward a state of sustained resilience.  In this blog, we explore the benefits of ISO 27001 for Saas businesses and the steps to getting audit-ready and certified.

Why should a SaaS business comply with ISO 27001?

El Certificación ISO 27001 allows SaaS businesses to have a proactive approach toward information security and protecting sensitive data. It enables them to capture customer trust and ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their systems, data, and processes. 

But that’s not all. ISO for SaaS comes with more benefits like:

1. Builds resilience against cyber attacks

Implementando el ISO 27001:2022 controls lets you identify and mitigate vulnerabilities in your system to protect your system against growing threats. The risk-based approach safeguards assets such as financial statements, employee data, and third-party information against riesgos cibernéticos, ensuring they remain intact, confidential, and accessible when needed.

2. Boosts customer confidence

Getting ISO 27001 certification for your SaaS business showcases that you care about the information your customers provide you. Since it follows best practices to minimize risks, it upholds customer confidence, as well as that of your shareholders. 

3. Helps prepare for new threats

Getting ISO 27001 certified will prepare your organization and its assets, including your employees, technology used, and processes to confront potential security risks related to infosec. Monitoring ISO controls gives you an upper hand against vulnerabilities across all assets. 

4. Ahorra costes 

The average cost of facing a data breach for a business stands at 4.45 millones de dólares as of 2023, and the number is only increasing. Hence, the cost savings from preventing breaches with ISO 27001 can be significant.

The ISO 27001 international standard is very comprehensive in nature. For example, when HubEngage, an employee engagement SaaS platform, implemented ISO, Sunil Sarda, Head of Engineering, noted, “We had to do some 10% more to meet GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC2 requirements."

Read the full case study on how HubEngage took only 15 hours to implement ISO 27001.

5. Enhances competitive advantage

Most vendors or third parties require you to complete cuestionarios de seguridad when signing contracts. This process can be time-consuming. Being ISO 27001 certified not only accelerates this process but also conserves your resources. 

In today’s competitive SaaS market, ISO certification not only establishes your reputation as a trusted business partner but also positions your company as a preferred choice for potential clients and partners.

Getting ISO 27001 certification for SaaS businesses: 13 key steps

Getting ISO 27001 for SaaS involves developing an ISMS and conducting risk assessments and audits according to the annexures and clauses in the ISO 27001 document. To make things easier for you, we’ve broken it down into simple, actionable steps to get your certification from start to finish. 

The 13 key steps involved in getting ISO 27001 for SaaS businesses in brief are:

1. Form an internal ISO team: The ISO team of a SaaS company should have an information security officer who is internally nominated. The team should also consist of key employees from your IT team and any other stakeholders involved in security decisions. 

2. Build an ISMS: Your ISMS must align with your Alcance de la norma ISO 27001. Building your ISMS includes defining what kind of data you want to protect. As a SaaS business, you must safeguard your third-party information, customer data, company databases, etc. 

3. Develop ISMS policies, processes & documentation: ISO 27001 requires a lot of documentation. Everything contained in your ISMS should be formalized with documents, well-defined processes and policies. Refer to the table below to know the prerequisites. 

Políticas	Procedimientos obligatorios
Política de seguridad de la información	Clasificación y gestión de la información
Política de dispositivos móviles	Gestión de Activos Inventario
Política de acceso remoto/teletrabajo	Gestión de vulnerabilidad
Política de control de acceso	Gestión de soportes (extraíbles) y dispositivos de almacenamiento
Política de escritorio y pantalla despejados	Gestión de acceso de usuarios
Política de uso aceptable de los activos de información	Trabajar en áreas seguras
Política de comunicaciones (transferencia de información)	Gestión del Cambio
Política o plan de desarrollo seguro	Gestión de capacidad
Supplier Management Security Policy	Anti-Malware
Política de clasificación de datos	Copia de seguridad y recuperación
	Gestión de Incidentes de Seguridad de la Información
	Plan de negocios continuo
Documentos Obligatorios	Documentos adicionales
Alcance del SGSI	Descripciones de puestos de trabajo de empleados que trabajan con seguridad de la información.
Declaración de aplicabilidad	Capacitación del personal
Inventario de Activos	Audit Process Plans
Evaluación de riesgos y plan de tratamiento (se abordará en detalle más adelante)	Planes de mantenimiento y trabajos de mantenimiento realizados
Funciones y responsabilidades de seguridad	Registros, KPI, cifras clave, archivos de configuración y planes de red.

4. Conduct risk assessment and treatment: The risk assessment should entail all your assets, people, processes, and systems. Classify risks based on their likelihood of occurrence and prioritize estrategias de mitigación de riesgos para información sensible. 

Evaluación del riesgo and mitigation should be done using tools like risk registers, risk matrix, SWOT analysis, etc. A better way to proceed would be to adopt a software de gestión de riesgos that maps risks to Requisitos de cumplimiento de la norma ISO 27001 to give you real-time insights. 

5. Ready the Statement of Applicability (SOA): The SOA is a list of Annex A controls that your SaaS business has decided to adopt. It contains details about why the controls have been included or excluded. It also enlists relevant documentation on how each control es ejecutado.

6. Implement ISMS policies and controls: Identify challenges regarding your control objectives. Implement and test solutions, processes, and technologies to reduce risk and operational failures based on your scope. Monitor and review the ISMS’s performance and update and improve the ISMS based on results and identified failures.

Here’s an actionable plan-do-check-act cycle to implement your SaaS ISMS:

7. Conduct employee awareness and training programs: ISO 27001 requires SaaS businesses to conduct basic security training for employees, periodic awareness programs, and role-based training. Employees must also be aware of how to common threats regarding infosec.

Obtenga más información sobre Formación ISO 27001. 

8. Conduct gap analysis and remediate: You can do this by downloading a copy of the ISO 27001 standard and checking each control of your SaaS business. Then, you need to create a mitigation plan to remedy the gaps. 

9. Undergo internal audit: The internal audit can be carried out by a designated internal auditor or an external contractual auditor. It consists of a documentation review, a field review, an internal audit report, and a senior management review.

You can use the following document to conduct an internal audit of your SaaS business:

10. Undergo a Stage 1 audit: This is the first stage of the external audit to be conducted by an external certified ISO 27001 auditor. They will review all your documentation against the defined ISO scope. At the end of it, you’ll receive a readiness report and improvement areas. 

11. Undergo a Stage 2 audit: The Stage 2 audit collects all the evidence against the ISO 27001 controls for your SaaS business. The external auditor will evaluate, review and test the controls and submit a report on the findings. The certification process will go through if you do not have several non-conformities. 

12. Undergo periodic surveillance audits post-certification: The ISO 27001 certification lasts three years as long as you conduct period audits at the end of every year. It’s very similar to the Stage 2 audit but not as comprehensive. 

13. Improve continuously: As your business grows, so should your ISMS. That only works when control health, risk changes, and evidence stay visible between audits, not just during them.

Sprinto helps you move from first-time ISO setup to continuous compliance by pulling evidence from 300+ integrations, monitoring control health in the background, and keeping audit-ready records organized as the environment changes. The platform’s auditor workspace then makes Stage 1, Stage 2, and later surveillance reviews easier because the evidence is already structured when auditors need it.

For more detailed information on the above steps, read ISO 27001 Implementation Roadmap. 

If you’re too lazy to read the whole list, you can watch the following video:

Compliance for SaaS made easy

The hardest part of ISO 27001 is keeping policies, evidence, risk treatment, and ownership aligned while the business keeps shipping.

Sprinto is built for that stage. The platform’s autonomous compliance workflows give SaaS teams one operating layer for ISO 27001 with cloud integrations to pull evidence automatically, policy and training workflows to formalize people controls, risk registers and gap views to prioritize remediation, and a live dashboard that shows which controls are healthy, drifting, or overdue.

That means first-time certification gets simpler, and staying compliant after certification gets more realistic. Instead of rebuilding proof before every audit, your team works from a current system of record that internal auditors, external auditors, and control owners can all use.

Here’s how the vendor report looks like:

With Sprinto, your team can:

• Collaborate with auditors in a dedicated workspace instead of passing PDFs back and forth
• Use pre-built ISO 27001 policies, training modules, and acknowledgment workflows
• Connect cloud, access, code, and HR systems to collect audit-grade evidence automatically
• Monitor control health continuously with context-rich alerts when something slips
• Review risk, gap, vendor, and health reports from one place

Preguntas frecuentes

1. What are the ISO 27001 certification requirements for SaaS companies?

El Requisitos de la norma ISO 27001 for SaaS companies are:

• Establish an ISMS
• Realizar evaluaciones de riesgos
• Have a risk treatment plan
• Implement mandatory controls
• Document all processes and controls
• Realizar auditorías internas
• Conduct external audit and management review
• Improve the ISMS continuously 

2. Is ISO 27001 applicable to software services?

Yes, ISO/IEC 27001 is applicable to software services and plays a crucial role as the ISO standard contains three technical controls for software development:

• Control A.14.2.9: Mandatory acceptance testing against functional and non-functional requirements, including security.
• Control A.14.2.8: Conduct security tests throughout the development process.
• Control A.12.1.4: Separate development, test, and operational environments.

3. What is the difference between ISO 27001 and SOC 2?

The differences between ISO 27001 and SOC 2 are outlined below:

Aspecto	ISO 27001,	SOC 2
Enfócate	Sistema de Gestión de Seguridad de la Información (SGSI)	Service Organization Control (SOC) for data security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy
Marco de seguridad	Prescriptive controls and requirements	Criterios de servicios de confianza (TSC)
<b></b><b></b>	En toda la organización	Specific to service providers
Certificación	Certificación reconocida internacionalmente	Attestation by CPA firms
Auditorías	Auditorías internas y externas	Independent third-party audit
Aplicabilidad	Broad, for any organization	Specifically for service organizations

4. Do all companies need to comply with ISO 27001?

No, ISO 27001 compliance is not mandatory for all companies, but it is highly recommended for organizations that handle sensitive information or operate in industries where data security is critical. Industries such as finance or healthcare, may have regulatory requirements that align closely with ISO 27001.