What it is
The distinction that decides what you can claim
ISO publishes tens of thousands of standards, and the ones a compliance team meets fall into two groups that are constantly confused. A small number are management system standards: they state requirements, and an accredited certification body can audit you against them and issue a certificate. The rest are guidance, codes of practice or control sets. They are just as useful, and you cannot be certified to them.
Getting this wrong is expensive in a tender. A supplier that writes "ISO 31000 certified" on a bid has told the evaluator something that cannot be true, because ISO 31000 is guidance and has no certification scheme. The same trap catches ISO 27002 and ISO 27005.
Quality
ISO 9001 is the quality management system standard, and the one most contracts mean when they ask for "a quality system". It is certifiable, and it is also the foundation the defence world builds on: AQAP 2110 contains its requirements and adds NATO's on top.
Information security
One certifiable standard, surrounded by publications that make it workable:
- ISO 27001 - the information security management system. This is the certifiable one; everything below supports it.
- ISO 27002 - the control set behind an ISO 27001 certificate: what each control actually means in practice.
- ISO 27005 - guidance for the information security risk assessment that ISO 27001 clauses 6.1.2 and 6.1.3 require you to do.
- ISO 27017 - cloud-specific controls, and the shared-responsibility boundary between you and your provider.
- ISO 27018 - protection of personal data processed in the cloud.
ISO 27017 and ISO 27018 are codes of practice rather than separate certifications. You are certified against ISO 27001; those two extend the control set and can be brought inside that certificate's scope.
Risk
ISO 31000 is the international guidance for managing risk of any kind, and it is deliberately not certifiable. Its value is a common vocabulary and a defensible process, which is what an auditor is looking for when they ask how you decided something was acceptable.
How ISO fits with the defence standards
If you supply defence, ISO 9001 is rarely the whole ask. The AQAP publications build on it: AQAP 2110 contains the ISO 9001 requirements and adds configuration management, government quality assurance and contract risk, while AQAP 2310 does the same with EN 9100. So an ISO 9001 system is the foundation you would build either way, and the defence work is the delta on top.
Not the standard you were looking for?
ComplyTrain is not limited to the standards written up on this site. The product is built around a requirement tree, and a requirement tree can be built for any standard, agreement or contractual specification that has requirements in it - ISO 13485, ISO 14001, ISO 45001, IEC 62443, EN 9100 and the rest included. The pages here are what we have documented so far, not the boundary of what the system handles.
We add standards on request, and the list grows steadily. If the standard your customer or contract requires is not here, tell us which one you need and we will tell you what supporting it in your workspace involves.