What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on OIS-02 Information Security Policy?

Information security policy carrying dated approval by the executive board or equivalent body; Publication or distribution record proving the policy reached employees and contracted personnel; Customer facing copy of the policy or the portal location where customers obtain it; Organisation chart naming the security roles and reporting lines the policy declares.

What is the most common gap auditors find on OIS-02?

Policy signed off by a security manager instead of top management

BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) · C5: Organisation of Information Security

`OIS-02` Information Security Policy

Top management adopts an information security policy and issues it to internal staff, external personnel and cloud customers, setting out why security matters, the security objectives and target level, the core security strategy, and the security organisation.

Source: BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue), OIS-02. The statement above is our statement of the clause, read from the published text and cited so you can check it against the official text, not the instrument verbatim. Open BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) in the compliance library.

The edition of the catalogue is not stamped here; check the edition your attestation is issued against.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

hard

to go live

Policy repository / GRC workspace

where the evidence lives

teal = a system already holds it · olive = produced at each review. To go live: easy when half or more of the artefacts are already held by a system, moderate from a quarter to a half, hard below a quarter.

These are the artefacts auditors commonly ask for on this requirement, our guidance rather than text from the standard. Your assessor decides what is sufficient in your context, and asks for samples across the period when a report covers one.

system holds itEvidence a system already holds

none for this control

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Publication or distribution record proving the policy reached employees and contracted personnel · HR system / LMS

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Information security policy carrying dated approval by the executive board or equivalent body · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Customer facing copy of the policy or the portal location where customers obtain it · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Organisation chart naming the security roles and reporting lines the policy declares · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

No system holds this evidence for you: it is people and documents. Reminders and routing to the owner still save time. Put the document under version control with an owner and review date, and log each review as a record with reviewer and date.

Common gaps auditors find

Policy signed off by a security manager instead of top management
Security objectives and target protection level stated generically with no link to business goals
External personnel and cloud customers are never given sight of the policy
Declared security organisation no longer matches the current reporting structure

Do this for your whole sheet

Paste the rows you run your controls from and get this mapping for every control at once, with the periodic-review ones flagged and a first move per row. No account for the first run.

Build my evidence sheet

OIS-01 Information Security Management System (ISMS) · OIS-03 Interfaces and Dependencies