6 Best Practices for ISO 27001 Compliance Startups Should Know
Lam Anh
July 24, 2025 • 6 min read
If you are a company dealing with large amounts of client and partner information, you’ve likely come across ISO 27001, a international standard for information security management. Being compliant with this standard can surely demonstrate your commitment to data protection and boost your reputation to future clients.
However, achieving an ISO 27001 certification is not a walk in the park, given its requirements and the amount of documentation and evidence to prepare. If you are just doing things blindly, you are likely to mess up, waste months of your time and frustrate your whole team. Before you start your ISO 27001 (and security compliance in general) journey, here are some best practices you should follow for a smoother and more efficient experience!
1. Map Your Compliance Goal and Journey
Before drafting policies or scheduling audits, clarify which frameworks align with your business objectives:
- Are your customers expecting SOC 2?
- Are you targeting EU markets requiring GDPR?
- Are you thinking of expanding your markets gloablly, thus the need for ISO 27001?
Conduct a gap assessment to compare your current security controls with required standards - even a simple spreadsheet can identify key opportunities.
2. Document Every Control and Process
Suppose you have identified that the global standard ISO 27001 is the most suitable for your needs, let's get to work and gather documentation!
In compliance, undocumented processes don’t count. ISO 27001 auditors require evidence of routine actions such as:
- Enabling multi‑factor authentication
- Conducting access reviews
- Applying vendor risk assessments
Using templates for documentation ensures consistency, streamlines audits, and supports team alignment.
3. Automate Routine Tasks and Tracking
Manual tracking of evidence, reminders, and reviews is error‑prone and time‑consuming. Unless you have got a big team and/or compliance experts onboard, automation tools can be an option to help reduce your workload. Some features include:
- Assign recurring tasks to control owners
- Log evidence and control updates automatically
- Send alerts for upcoming reviews
Automating manual tasks like tracking evidence updates and task manangement makes the compliance journey less time-consuming and burdensome, giving you time to focus on building your product and business.
Ready to Implement ISO 27001?
Enter your email to receive a free ISO 27001 checklist and start your compliance journey today.
4. Enforce Access Control and Audit Trails
ISO 27001 mandates controlled access and documented records. Best practices include:
- Enforcing role‑based access control
- Conducting regular permission reviews
- Offering audit trail features for tracking changes to evidence and control updates
Audit‑ready access records ensure transparency and operational integrity.
5. Maintain Secure System Configurations
Unpatched systems pose serious risks to your data security and can lead to unauthorized access or system failures. ISO 27001 requires organizations to implement strong practices for securing system configurations, including:
- Consistent patching of software and firmware
- Hardened configurations, disabling unnecessary services, ports, and protocols
- Application of least‑privilege principles, granting users and systems only the permissions necessary for their tasks
By maintaining secure configurations, your startup minimizes the risk of security breaches, data leaks, and more easily meet security compliance standards.
6. Develop and Maintain an Incident Response Plan
An incident response plan is essential for ISO 27001 compliance and should include:
- Clear roles and responsibilities
- Internal and external communication protocols
- Guidelines for notifying regulators and customers
Simple checklists are often more effective than lengthy documents in high‑pressure incidents.
How Smartly Assists Your ISO 27001 Preparation
As an automated compliance platform, Smartly can help companies speed up their ISO 27001 preparation and make sure you have everything you need, with:
- Prebuilt policy templates and risk documentation: Access policy templates that align with ISO 27001 requirements, including Information Security, Data Protection, Incident Response, etc. and eliminate the need for manual drafting
- Automated evidence collection and audit trails: Automatically collect evidence and ensure that all actions, changes, and updates are logged, reducing the manual effort of tracking security controls and documentation.
- Real-time progress tracking dashboard: Continuously monitor the status of your ISO 27001 preparation, with real-time updates on compliance progress and gaps.
- Task management and collaboration: Assign tasks, monitor progress, share documents, provide feedback, and manage version control on policies, risk assessments, audits, and more.
Smartly enables startups to reach their ISO 27001 compliance goals with little effort and time, reducing 70% of your manual work - because we understand compliance should motivate, not hinder growth!
Summary Table
| Step | Action |
|---|---|
| 1 | Map frameworks and run a gap assessment |
| 2 | Document all controls and processes |
| 3 | Automate reminders, logs, and evidence |
| 4 | Implement RBAC, review access, maintain logs |
| 5 | Patch systems and enforce secure configurations |
| 6 | Create and maintain a clear incident response plan |
Conclusion
ISO 27001 certification is achievable for startups, even those with limited resources. By planning ahead, automating key processes, and staying organized with documentation, your startup can meet compliance requirements without slowing down growth. Focusing on security early on not only builds customer trust but also makes it easier to work with larger enterprises. And with Smartly, you can simplify the compliance process and ensure your startup is on the right track without the added stress!