Manage sets of rules in the ISMS

Sets of rules are the written specifications of your ISMS — for example the IT security policy, the password policy or procedural instructions. In this article you open the overview, organise your policies and link them to the requirements whose implementation they support.

Prerequisites

• You are logged into a team that uses the “Rule sets” module.
• You have permission to view sets of rules. To create, edit or archive them, you additionally need the respective permission.
• To link them to requirements, at least one list of requirements has been loaded and you have permission to edit requirements.

Open and search the overview

1. In the left-hand menu, click “Collateral securities” and then “Rule sets”. Below the page title “Rule sets”, a table of all sets of rules created so far appears.
2. The standard columns are “Status”, “Designation”, “Association”, “Tasks” and “Tags”. Use the “Columns” button at the top right to show or hide additional columns.
3. Enter a term in the “Search term” field to narrow the list, or click “Filter” to expand the filter area.
4. Sort the table using the “Status” and “Designation” column headings. The active sorting is displayed above the table and can be removed via “Reset”.
5. Using the drop-down menu to the right of “Columns”, set the number of entries per page (5, 10, 25, 50, 100).

Structure your sets of rules instead of categorising them

There is no dedicated category field — the structure comes from the designation, tags, association and saved views.

1. Assign the “Designation” according to a uniform scheme, for example [Area] - [Topic] - [Version] such as IT Security - Password Policy - 2026.
2. Add topic keywords using the “Tags” button in the title line of the detail page; the “Tags” column makes them visible in the overview.
3. Under “Association”, in the “Organisations” section, assign the set of rules to the scopes it applies to.
4. Save a suitable filter and sort combination using the “Views” drop-down menu under “Save view” — this gives you permanent views such as “Technical policies” or “Annual review due”. Manage them under “Edit views”.

Link a set of rules to a requirement

1. Open the requirement from the “ISMS cockpit” or from the detail view of the list of requirements.
2. In the “Contents” tab, click “New” in the “Links” section.
3. Select the document type and the set of rules to be linked, then confirm the selection.
4. To explain the link, open it and edit the “Description” field under “Edit link”.
5. On the page of the set of rules, the assignment appears in the “Relationships” tab. The “Revisions” tab additionally proves which version was valid at which point in time.

From practice: structure extensive sets of rules consistently using the “Section numbering” (default value “Standard (I. 1. a.)”). Stable numbering lets you refer precisely to individual points in requirements, tasks and comments — for example “see section II.3.b of the IT security policy” — instead of referring to the whole document.