The ISO 27001 ISMS Pitstop
ISO 27001: A stop-the-show annual service, or smooth and efficient ‘pit stops’?
If you’ve ever felt like maintaining your ISO 27001, Information Security Management System (ISMS) is like changing the oil in your car while driving in the fast lane, you’re not alone.
For many organisations maintaining ISO 27001 certification, their ISMS becomes something that happens in an all-consuming burst: the intense push before audits, a mad scramble to gather evidence, and a temporary halt to ‘business as usual’ while compliance takes centre stage.
It’s disruptive, it’s inefficient, coffee reserves run low, stress levels hike up and staff starting resenting the ISMS and develop a unconscious eye roll whenever it’s mentioned.
And it often misses the point..
Rebecca Forward, Consultants Like Us explains what the problems are and what you need to do to fix the problem.
The Problem: The “Big Bang” ISMS Approach
Too many organisations fall into the trap of treating the maintenance or improvement of their ISMS as a once-a-year event (“It’s audit time again!”):
- A full internal audit crammed into a short window.
- A single, overloaded Management Review meeting.
- Annual overly-long training sessions that people ‘don’t have time for’ and quickly forget.
- Documentation reviews done in bulk.
- Supplier evaluations and re-assessments completed “because the calendar says so”.
- A frantic flurry of communications and evidence grabbing because the auditors are coming!
In theory, this approach can tick boxes, you may be exhausted and business may have suffered from the sudden pause to service the system, but, it can get you through your audit. In reality however, it creates risk. Issues can go unnoticed for months, controls become stale, and by the time you uncover problems, they’re harder, and more expensive, to fix.
Most importantly, it turns your ISMS into a ‘compliance exercise’ rather than a living, breathing system that actually improves security.
The Shift: Think “ISMS Pit Stop,” not “Annual Service”
Instead of putting the car off the road once a year and hoping for the best, what if you adopted a Formula 1 mindset? How about embracing the idea of the ISMS Pit Stop: a “little and often” approach that keeps your system running smoothly all year round.
Rather than large, disruptive interventions, you make small, targeted adjustments continuously, without slowing down the business..
Breaking the myths
To make this shift, it helps to challenge some common misconceptions:
“We must audit everything every year.”
Not true. A risk-based internal audit programme is not only acceptable, it’s encouraged. Ideally, you will internally audit all requirements across your 3-year certification cycle, but how often you choose to audit specific requirements is up to you; focus on what matters most, when it matters most.
“One annual audit is enough.”
A single sweep can leave you exposed for months. Smaller, more frequent audits provide earlier visibility, faster correction, and keep the system fresh in everyone’s minds.
“Management review has to be a big meeting.”
It doesn’t. Firstly, ISO 27001 doesn’t even require management review to be in the form of a meeting. But if you choose to run it that way then why not embed ISMS management review agenda items into existing leadership meetings. You also don’t need to cover all the required inputs every time, spread the load intelligently.
“Training requires time away from work.”
Effective awareness doesn’t have to mean full-day sessions. Think nudges, short updates, and ongoing communication that reinforce behaviours over time.
“Document reviews should be done in one go.”
Batch reviewing documents is inefficient and often superficial. Reviewing them incrementally improves quality and relevance.
“Suppliers must be reviewed annually.”
Not necessarily; apply a risk-based approach, some suppliers warrant more frequent attention than others. Also, try not to fall into the mindset that issuing lengthy supplier questionnaires that can take weeks to be returned (if ever) is the only method for due diligence, there are smarter ways to approach this that save time, and your sanity, and give you the outcome you need.
“Evidence means more documents.”
Not always. Valuable evidence already exists within your systems; tickets, logs, dashboards, metrics. Look at what evidence you already have, or how you can set up your systems to automatically or quickly produce reports and data.
The Solution: Build a continuous ISMS rhythm
A Pit Stop approach isn’t about doing more work, it’s about doing smarter work.
Here’s what it can look like in practice:
- Monthly or quarterly micro-audits focused on key risks.
- Rolling management review inputs built into existing governance forums.
- Continuous awareness campaigns rather than annual training spikes.
- Staggered document reviews aligned to change or risk.
- Dynamic supplier monitoring based on criticality.
- Real-time evidence collection from operational systems.
This creates a rhythm, one where your ISMS evolves alongside your business, rather than lagging behind it or stopping it in its tracks.
The Payoff: More than just a smooth audit
Yes, adopting this approach makes certification audits easier. Your ‘MOT’ becomes a non-event because you’ve been maintaining the system all along.
But the real value goes deeper:
- Better visibility of risk.
- Faster response to issues.
- Stronger security culture.
- Less disruption to business operations.
- Greater confidence from stakeholders.
In short, your ISMS starts doing what it was designed to do: protect the organisation, not just pass an audit.
What you can do next
If you’re currently running a “big bang” ISMS, you don’t need to overhaul everything overnight. Start small:
- Identify one activity you can break into smaller, more frequent pieces.
- Introduce a risk-based lens to your audit or supplier programme.
- Replace one annual task with a rolling approach.
- Leverage existing meetings instead of creating new ones.
- Identify data you already produce that can be used as evidence.
Progressively, these small changes will shift your ISMS from reactive to proactive.
A well-run ISMS shouldn’t feel like an emergency stop, it should feel like a finely tuned system, constantly adjusted, always improving.
More questions?
If this resonates and you’re wondering where to start making changes for the better, or you’d like some support to refresh your approach to maintaining your ISMS, the pit stop crew at Consultants Like Us are happy to help!
We are ISO 27001 Consultants who provide ‘Compliance without Complexity’® and we know we can help you… we even wrote a book about it. For more information on how to implement ISO 27001, written by ISO 27001 consultants like us, you like to consider buying our book, “The Real Easy Guide to ISO27001” which is available on Amazon.
If you’d like to talk through any of the points above, please get in touch.
Whether it’s to discuss if ISO 27001 is right for you or to help understand what ISO 42001 could mean for your organisation or to see how both standards fit into your AI and cyber strategy.