Running Your ISMS Like a Well-Oiled Machine
Picture this: you’re at your favourite café, latte in hand, sketching out how to keep your organisation’s information secure. You’ve got policies, risk registers and incident logs scattered across tools—some free, some paid—and you need clarity. You also need to prove to auditors you’re on top of everything. The good news is, you don’t need expensive enterprise suites to run a solid ISO 27001-aligned ISMS. A blend of open-source projects and budget-friendly services can deliver a streamlined, sustainable system. Let’s walk through how teams everywhere have done it—domain by domain.
1. Asset Management: Knowing Exactly What You Own
The “Laptop Hide-and-Seek” Wake-Up Call
Not long ago I consulted to a growing tech firm. They’d hired people so fast that devices seemed to vanish into thin air. When an auditor asked, “Show me your firewall serials,” the team broke into a sweat. They were maintaining an asset register in a spreadsheet—prone to duplicate entries and out-of-date information.
Enter Snipe-IT
We spun up Snipe-IT in a Docker container on their private cloud. Within a few hours they had every laptop, server and switch port entered, complete with purchase date, warranty end and custodian name. Even better, they connected it to their HR system so when someone left, their devices automatically moved to “Available” status—no more guesswork.
When Your Network is a Labyrinth: Ralph
Some clients I work with run hundreds of IP ranges across on-prem and cloud. They needed a tool that treats IPAM as a first-class citizen. Ralph became their go-to. It not only tracks hardware assets but also maps IP addresses, subnets and switch ports. Suddenly their network diagrams were living, breathing records instead of static Visio files.
Already in the Atlassian Family?
If you’re using Jira Service Management, consider the Insight app (now bundled). Create an “Asset” issue type with fields for serial number, location and owner. Link every incident ticket directly to the affected device. When a server raises an alert, your helpdesk ticket already tells you who to call.
2. Risk Management: From Sticky Notes to a Living Register
Turning Overused Spreadsheets into a Dynamic System
I once joined a non-profit whose risk process looked like this: print out a spreadsheet, highlight changes in neon, email it around, and manually merge feedback. They wanted speed and transparency.
SimpleRisk in 30 Minutes
SimpleRisk, a lean open-source platform, was the perfect quick win. In under half an hour they had “Top 20 risks” defined, heat maps showing high-priority issues and email alerts when treatment tasks were overdue. No more sorting through version-control nightmares.
Leveling Up with ERamba
When they outgrew SimpleRisk, we migrated to ERamba. It offers a full governance-risk-compliance suite: ISO 27001 control mappings, policy management, audit workflows. The transition let them retire half a dozen bespoke tools and centralise everything from risk assessments to compliance attestations.
Do-It-Yourself in Jira
Some teams I work with refuse to buy GRC suites. They build a custom Jira project with three issue types: Risk, Control and Treatment. Risks link to controls, controls link to evidence attachments. Dashboards automatically surface overdue items. It takes a few afternoons of Jira admin, but afterwards you’ve got a living, breathing risk-tracking engine.
3. Document and Policy Management: No More “Final_Final_v3.docx”
Giving Auditors a Satisfying Scroll
Chasing sign-off on policies—an activity so beloved by no one. I saw one manager spend half a day every quarter emailing PDFs, tracking approvals and merging comments. We found a simpler path.
Confluence for the Win
Confluence offers version history, page-level permissions and approval workflows via add-ons. One education provider I work with created an “ISMS Policy” space restricted to InfoSec authors. Department heads had “view and comment” rights only. When it was time for their annual review, Confluence notified everyone automatically. No more chasing replies.
Self-Hosted Alternative: Nextcloud
If you prefer keeping data on your own servers, Nextcloud plus the “Workflow” and “E-Sign” apps delivers a similar experience. Store your Word, PDF and Excel files in a dedicated folder, tag them by “Control Owner” and “Review Date,” and let Nextcloud trigger review reminders and gather e-signatures.
Minimalist Approach: Paperwork
For teams that need nothing fancy, Paperwork is a distraction-free document repository. It nails tagging and full-text search. If all you need is a simple library for your ISMS artefacts, it’s a solid lightweight choice.
4. Incident Management: From Panic to Process
When Something Goes Wrong
Imagine your monitoring flags unusual activity on a critical server at 2 am. Does your on-call engineer dash off an email? Or does an incident case appear in a structured system?
TheHive and Cortex Integration
At a financial services client, Wazuh agents detected a suspicious file drop. A webhook instantly created a case in TheHive, enriched it with threat intel via Cortex, and assigned it to the security analyst on duty. Every action—evidence pulled, commands run, remediation steps—was timestamped. Post-incident reporting became a matter of exporting the case timeline.
RTIR for Ticket-Based Workflows
For smaller teams that don’t need all the SOC bells and whistles, RTIR (Request Tracker for Incident Response) adds incident-response extensions to a classic ticketing system. It’s more helpdesk-style but still enforces consistent workflows and logging.
Atlassian Stack: Jira Service Management
If your IT department already runs on Jira, use Service Management’s incident, problem and change modules. You can tag incidents by severity, automate escalations with Opsgenie, and link back to Confluence pages for playbooks. Everything stays in one familiar interface.
5. Vulnerability Management: Find the Gaps Before Attackers Do
Scheduling Scans and Driving Remediation
I’ve seen organisations defer vulnerability scans because “the licence expired last week.” Meanwhile, real threats circle.
OpenVAS: Your Free Scanner
OpenVAS (part of the Greenbone ecosystem) handles network scans, regular feed updates and role-based access. One startup I advised scheduled daily scans of their cloud footprint. We scripted exports of critical CVEs and imported them into SimpleRisk as new risk entries. The remediation loop closed itself.
Nikto in Your CI/CD
Nikto is a quick web-server scanner that identifies outdated software and dangerous defaults. We dropped it into a GitLab CI job so every merge to production included a Nikto check. If it flagged a problem, the pipeline failed—catching issues early.
6. Security Awareness and Training: Your People as Defenders
Phishing Simulations That Educate, Not Embarrass
Technology can block many threats, but a well-crafted email still tricks people every day. Building awareness is non-negotiable.
Phishing Frenzy for Custom Campaigns
Phishing Frenzy lets you design campaigns with realistic templates, track click-rates and provide immediate feedback. At a mid-sized law firm, every new joiner received a benign “Welcome to the team” phishing email. Anyone who clicked got an instant in-browser tutorial. Their click-rate dropped by 60 per cent in six months.
Gophish: Lightweight and Friendly
Gophish is easy to deploy—just a Go binary and a web UI. One regional council used it for quarterly phishing drills, then exported results to a simple Confluence dashboard. It complemented their annual classroom sessions perfectly.
Entry-Level Investment: KnowBe4
If you lack internal resources to build content, KnowBe4’s entry-level plan gives you professional training modules, simulated campaigns and compliance reporting. For a small per-user fee, you get polished materials that free your team to focus on interpreting results and coaching staff.
7. Monitoring and Logging: Keeping an Eye on What Matters
Alerts That Drive Action
Logs are only useful if someone sees and responds to them.
Wazuh for Holistic Monitoring
Built on OSSEC, Wazuh adds file-integrity monitoring, compliance rules and real-time dashboards via Kibana. One manufacturing client uncovered an insider-threat attempt because a Wazuh rule flagged unauthorised changes to engineering blueprints. That alert—that case—then fed directly into TheHive for triage.
OSSEC for Lightweight HIDS
If you don’t need the full Elastic Stack, plain OSSEC agents forwarding critical alerts into your SIEM or ticketing system can suffice. The key is capturing unusual events—disabled services, unexpected binaries—and making sure they trigger a process, not just a log entry.
8. Weaving the Pieces Together: A Day-by-Day Narrative
Rather than deploy every tool at once, here’s how a small team might roll out their ISMS over time:
- Week 1 – Asset Clarity
- Deploy Snipe-IT via Docker.
- Configure API integration with HR to auto-register devices.
- Week 2 – Risk Foundation
- Set up SimpleRisk.
- Import top assets from Snipe-IT and define your first 10 risks.
- Create a living heat map and assign owners.
- Week 3 – Vulnerability Rhythm
- Schedule OpenVAS scans against internet-facing IPs.
- Script CSV exports of critical findings into SimpleRisk.
- Week 4 – Incident Process
- Stand up TheHive and Cortex.
- Connect Wazuh alerts via webhook so every high-severity event spawns a case.
- Month 2 – Training Culture
- Launch a Gophish campaign for phishing awareness.
- Automatically create Jira Service Management tasks for anyone who clicks.
- Quarterly – Policy Reviews
- Author policies in Confluence with restricted editing.
- Use built-in reminders to nudge reviewers and gather e-signatures.
By automating hand-offs—assets to risks, risks to incidents, incidents to training—you create a living ISMS that updates itself, surfaces issues in real time and collects audit evidence along the way.
Nine Lessons for Everyday ISMS Success
- Automate data flows wherever possible.
- Start small and prove ROI before expanding.
- Choose tools your team enjoys using. If everyone lives in Jira, start there.
- Treat your open-source stack like production servers. Patch and back up regularly.
- Use integrations to eliminate copy-and-paste.
- Assign clear ownership for every system and process.
- Measure engagement—track who’s completing training modules or responding to incidents.
- Blend paid services where they save time or provide critical support.
- Document your configurations so you can rebuild in a pinch.
Bringing It Home
Open-source and low-cost tools let you build an ISMS that’s both budget-friendly and robust. The secret isn’t in finding the perfect tool—it’s in choosing the right combination for your team, automating hand-offs, and maintaining discipline in patching, backups and reviews. With the right setup, you’ll spend less time on spreadsheets and more time on strategic decisions—protecting what matters most without breaking the bank.
Ready to get started? Spin up your first Docker container tonight, or reach out if you’d like help mapping your ideal toolchain.
