The information drives the world. Nowadays information is a core product for majority of companies and, for many, the only product. Others heavily depend on processing information for their business purposes. On the other hand, there are people with malicious intentions, trying to take advantage of the need for information to their benefit. The increasing number of threats forces companies to start thinking about protecting the information they handle by implementing protection measures starting with simple solutions.

The ISO/IEC 27000 family of standards supports companies willing to keep information assets safe. The use of this set of standards helps organisations to safely manage the security of their assets, being them financial information, intellectual property, employee details or other types of information.

This is of particular relevance for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which constitute the majority of businesses in Europe. SMEs are recognised to be the drive for innovations in Europe but the majority of them underestimate their risk level for cyber-attacks thinking that they do not handle any information that is worth stealing. On the contrary, small businesses have a lot of digital assets compared to an individual user and often have less security measures in place than large companies.

For this reason, SBS gathered the efforts of 12 experts from 8 countries to draft an SME Guide for the implementation of ISO/IEC 27001 on information security management. The Guide, which is currently under development and will be released in January 2018, is meant to be applicable to SMEs relying on technological assets. On the basis of ISO/IEC 27001 contents, the Guide will describe a list of activities that help to establish and/or raise information security related businesses and, consequently, to gain more operational and partnership opportunities within both the EU market and the local ones.

This is only the first of the initiatives that SBS will carry out in the field of information security management. On 26 March 2018, SBS will also organise a workshop in the framework of the Bulgarian presidency of the Council of the EU to present and further promote this SME Guide. Stay tuned!