In July 2014, the International Organization for Standardization (“ISO”) and International Electrotechnical Commission (“IEC”) published ISO/IEC 27018 (ISO 27018), a code of practice that sets forth standards and guidelines pertaining to the protection of data consisting of “personally identifiable information” processed by public cloud service providers.
ISO/IEC 27018 is the first International Standard that focuses on protection of personal data in the cloud. Although only a few months old, the new standard should finally give cloud users confidence that their service provider is well-placed to keep data private and secure.
ISO/IEC 27018 specifies certain minimum types of security measures that cloud providers should adopt, if applicable, including encryption and access controls. The cloud standard also requires cloud providers to implement security awareness policies and make relevant staff aware of the potential consequences (for staff, the cloud provider and the customer) of breaching privacy and security rules.
As the first-ever standard that deals with the protection of personal data for the cloud, ISO/IEC 27018 has the following key objectives:
ISO/IEC 27018 provides a practical basis to induce confidence in the cloud industry. At the same time, the public cloud industry will have clear guidance in order to meet some of the legal and regulatory concerns of its clients.
ISO/IEC 27018:2014 establishes commonly accepted control objectives, controls and guidelines for implementing measures to protect “personally identifiable information” in accordance with the privacy principles in ISO/IEC 29100 for the public cloud computing environment.
In particular, ISO/IEC 27018:2014 specifies guidelines based on ISO/IEC 27002, taking into consideration the regulatory requirements for the protection of “personally identifiable information” which might be applicable within the context of the information security risk environment(s) of a provider of public cloud services.
ISO/IEC 27018:2014 is applicable to all types and sizes of organizations, including public and private companies, government entities, and not-for-profit organizations, which provide information processing services as “personally identifiable information” processors via cloud computing under contract to other organizations.
The guidelines in ISO/IEC 27018:2014 might also be relevant to organizations acting as “personally identifiable information” controllers; however, “personally identifiable information” controllers can be subject to additional “personally identifiable information” protection legislation, regulations and obligations, not applying to “personally identifiable information” processors. ISO/IEC 27018:2014 is not intended to cover such additional obligations.
As a guiding principle, ISO/IEC 27018 standards and guidelines facilitate the retention by the cloud service customer of authority to determine the scope of any use and handling of its “personally identifiable information”. The following controls and implementation guidelines set forth in ISO/IEC 27018 as generally applicable to cloud service providers processing “personally identifiable information”:
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Tagged Cloud Computing, Data Protection, ISO, Privacy, Soft law