What is a cybersecurity policy? The complete guide
- Joe Perry
Cybersecurity is a significant threat to every business. Sadly, high profile cyberattacks are a regular occurrence in the news and result in high levels of damage and disruption.
Statistics reveal alarming levels of cybercrime. A recent UK government survey suggests that 43% of UK businesses have experienced a cybersecurity breach or attack in the past year alone. And with the rapid evolution of AI, cybersecurity risks are likely set to increase. The 2025 World Economic Forum Global Cybersecurity Outlook report reveals that 66% of organizations believe AI will have the most significant impact on cybersecurity in the next 12 months.
Having robust, clear, comprehensive, consistent, and up-to-date policies and procedures in place is absolutely essential to reduce cybersecurity risks. While many organisations do have policies in place, there is still clearly a lot of work to do.
For example, the same World Economic Forum report reveals that only 37% of organisations actually have a process in place to examine the security of AI in newly procured tools before they are actually launched. In practice, there are also often issues with the management and dissemination of cybersecurity policies. For example, policies may not be easy to find when employees actually need them.
In this article we’re going to do a deep dive into cybersecurity polices. We’re going to look at what is typically included in a cybersecurity policy, why it’s essential to have them in place, and how to successfully create, manage and distribute a cybersecurity policy.
What is a cybersecurity policy?
A cybersecurity policy can be considered to be a document or documents that detail an organisation’s approved approaches, processes, and related guidelines in order to protect its digital assets and systems against the risk of cybercrime. Its scope can cover the management of the entire digital workplace as well as external customer-facing sites,
Why is it critical to have a cybersecurity policy?
Cybersecurity is a critical area where there is no room for compromise. Businesses must have a comprehensive and clear view of what needs to be done to minimise the risks around of cybersecurity.
Having a cybersecurity policy helps to:
- Provide consistency across different business functions, divisions, and locations so there is a solid, validated approach right across the enterprise.
- Helps to underpin cybersecurity awareness and training for employees which is essential as many vulnerabilities are caused by user error and complacency.
- Helps to support important regulatory compliance and key security certifications such as ISO 27001.
- Is an essential reference for practical decision-making that has a positive real-world impact to reduce the risks of cybercrime.
- Dictates approaches and processes to follow to contain the impact of an attack if and when it actually happens, aligning with disaster recovery policies.
What’s included in a cybersecurity policy?
A cybersecurity policy might consist of one master document, but in reality, it could actually be a series of documents that covers numerous topics.
A policy will likely include some details which are common to most policies:
- Version of the policy and the date it was created and of any updates.
- The overall purpose and scope of the policy.
- Details of who owns and has input into the policy.
- Roles and responsibilities.
- Any related process steps.
- List of related policies.
- Guidelines and aids for employees.
More specifically, a cybersecurity policy or policies could include:
- Technical requirements and standards relating to cybersecurity.
- Policies around data security covering areas such as the use of security labels.
- Approaches to access to different systems such as “zero trust.”
- Data protection and data privacy approaches.
- Details around threat and vulnerability monitoring, detection, and prevention.
- Cyber awareness and education.
- Incident response.
- Data back-ups and disaster recovery details.
- Procurement processes to ensure new technology is reviewed from a cybersecurity perspective.
- Any terms of usage that users that must agree to.
- Approaches to cybersecurity related compliance certification and related auditing.
- Triggers for review of the cybersecurity policy.
- And more!
Who should be involved in creating a cybersecurity policy?
Cybersecurity policies are predominantly an area for IT functions, and it is quite possible they will ultimately own the policy. However, cybersecurity is an issue which impacts every team and employee. Therefore, a cybersecurity policy may need to get input and sign-off from:
Legal and compliance teams, especially if you are including terms of usage.
Leadership teams to advocate and support the overall approach.
HR and learning teams to cover cybersecurity awareness programmes.
Internal communications to help disseminate the policy and express it in a language so it widely understood.
Potentially even groups of users, to provide an important employee perspective.
Creating and managing a cybersecurity policy
It is essential to ensure there is a robust process in place to create a cybersecurity policy and then manage subsequent updates. Here are some tips.
Use a RACI matrix
There can be multiple different business functions involved in drafting, reviewing, and approving different parts of a cybersecurity policy. It is critical to include all the necessary subject-matter experts and business stakeholders in creating and managing the policy as well as subsequent updates.
Here a RACI matrix (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) relating to different parts of the policy such as technical standards or terms of usage can be very helpful. It provides clarity on who is involved, when and how, and how that relates to policy management processes.
Cyber security is a fast-moving area and cybersecurity policies will need to be continuously reviewed and subsequently updated. Again, the RACI matrix should cover processes for reviewing and updating.
Ensuring there is clarity on creation, review, and approval
You can then use your RACI matrix to define the steps and who is involved at each step in creating, reviewing, and approving the different parts of a cybersecurity policy. Ensure that you have absolute clarity on the details, that it is documented, and that all stakeholders understand and agree to these steps and their associated role. This means:
- There is always a clear path to creating and reviewing the policy which sometimes might need a rapid turnaround, particularly in response to an incident or attack.
- It ensures all the right experts are involved and at the right time.
- It reduces any back-and-forth, bottlenecks or arguments that are almost always counterproductive.
- You can demonstrate to regulatory or certification bodies you have a robust process in place.
- If you are using a product like Xoralia, you may also be able to design authoring, review, and approval workflows around the process to reduce risk and drive efficiency.
Make life easy for your stakeholders
Stakeholders involved in reviewing and updating policies will always be busy. Where possible, use notifications and nudges to remind them of actions, or even use a product like Xoralia or create views within SharePoint so they can easily view any upcoming review tasks or approval workflow steps they need to carry out. Using a platform with automation can do some of the heavy lifting around policy lifecycle management.
Disseminating the policy
It is essential that a cybersecurity policy is easily accessible to all staff and also understood.
- Make it actionable and easily available at the point of need
- Some policies are not really designed to be used and read. They are more to cover the organisation’s back and may even be written in “legalease,” only referred to if someone breaks the terms of use, for example. Cybersecurity policies are different. They should be there to be actively referenced and used to guide decision-making and provide clarity.
- Cybersecurity policies need to be actionable – written in such a way that they can be easily understood and followed – but then also very easily findable. Usually, the best way to do this is to have a central policy library with a powerful search and version control, so employees can be confident in finding the latest version of a cybersecurity policy successfully and quickly.
- Use an employee attestation process
- Sometimes it is necessary to ensure that employees acknowledge they have read and understood a mandatory cybersecurity policy, or any subsequent changes to it. This is usually done through an employee attestation process where employees tick a box on the policy, providing a digital record of their acknowledgement. Reporting and notifications usually mean that you can ensure all employees have acknowledged the cybersecurity policy.
- Of course, acknowledging a cyber security policy does not always guarantee that someone has actually read it, so ensuring that employees are also required to answer some quiz questions or carry out some related e-learning can support better understanding.
How Xoralia can help
A robust policy management solution like Xoralia has several features that help support the management and distribution of your cybersecurity policy or policies right through the lifecycle, overcoming challenges, driving efficiency, and minimising risks.
An easy-to-access central policy library with a powerful search
At the centre of Xoralia is a central, easy-to-access policy library where employees will be able to access the cybersecurity policy at the point of need, knowing that it is the very latest authoritative version of the policy. As Xoralia is built on SharePoint it also means that the policy library is completely integrated into your digital workplace and can be accessed via Teams or through your SharePoint intranet.
Employees can easily find what they are looking for through a powerful Microsoft-powered search as well as the ability to browse using custom metatags with terms that make sense to employees.
Different ways to present your cyber security policy
Xoralia differs from many other policy management and compliance solutions because it has an experience that is focused as much on the user as it is for the compliance team. One unique feature is a series of out-of-the-box web parts and widgets that allow you to present a cybersecurity policy in an attractive way embedded into different areas of your SharePoint intranet or site, as well as in Microsoft Teams.
Additionally, the Collection feature means that you can present a collection of cybersecurity and related policies together in one place to users, regardless of which SharePoint library they are held. This ensures employees will find all cybersecurity resources in one place.
Policy lifecycle management features
Xoralia has a range of tools that help with policy lifecycle management, supporting the creation and ongoing management of a complex policy such as cybersecurity which has multiple stakeholders and experts involved. Features include the ability to create custom multi-step workflows for the creation, review, and approval of a cybersecurity policy as well as subsequent updates. You can also create different workflows for certain sections of the policy which need to be reviewed by specific subject matter experts. There is also the ability to add automated review reminders, so policy updates no longer get missed.
Employee attestation features and follow-up quizzes
Xoralia has a robust set of employee attestation features that ensure employees acknowledge they have read and understood your mandatory cybersecurity policy or a subsequent change in it. Automated notifications send appropriate reminders to employees.
Robust and highly granular reporting then allows you to track progress and gain high rates of compliance, which you can also then demonstrate to regulatory and certification bodies. You can also set custom follow-up quizzes that test on the contents – for example, a particular change – to embed understanding and then report on it.
Audience targeting
Sometimes you may need to have multiple cybersecurity policies all of which are slightly different due to a variety of roles or locations. Xoralia allows you to target policies, notifications, employee attestation and more to different audiences based on Microsoft 365 groups and Microsoft Entra ID profile data.
Reducing cybersecurity risks though clear policies and greater awareness
Cybersecurity is one of the biggest challenges facing businesses today. Having a robust approach to managing and distributing your cybersecurity policies and procedures has the potential to make a material difference to your level of risk and will help with employee awareness, compliance, and certification.
A policy management solution like Xoralia makes managing and distributing the policy so much easier and is a relatively modest investment in a priority area. Why not book a free demo?
The story behind Xoralia
Xoralia was built by the team at Content Formula, an intranet and digital workplace consultancy that has built SharePoint intranets for some of the world’s most famous companies. Now, most companies want their policies and procedures on the intranet but they don’t just want to store them there, they also want tools to help better manage them. Over the years we came across just about every single requirement for a policy management system. As this article above explains, there are gaps in SharePoint and so we never built what in our mind was the perfect policy management system.
However, one of our clients challenged us to build something for them that filled all the gaps but still used SharePoint at the back end. We had a great relationship with them and agreed to share the budget to do this, provided we could then market the solution to others. That was in 2019. We’re now on version 3 of Xoralia and the product has grown and evolved a lot.
3 benefits you can expect from Xoralia
Make it easy to find policies
Centralised policy library with powerful search and filtering.
Reduce administrative burden
Automations and notifications so that all policy tasks are carried out on time
Demonstrate compliance and best practice
Sophisticated tracking and dashboards to drive and measure compliance.
And lots more!
What our clients say
AppSource review
A great time saver and tool for document management
Tim Galer
IT Coordinator
Hughes
Ideal partner for our regulated environment
Adam Lythgoe
IT Manager
LifeArc
How to get started with Xoralia
Step 1: request a demo
Fill out our form and we will be in touch to arrange a time. You can even book a time yourself.
Step 2: get a price proposal
If you think Xoralia is for you ask us for a quote. This will set out any options you may have.
Step 3: install and launch
We’ll install Xoralia in your environment (or you can do it yourself). We’ll provide training and support to get you up and running quickly.
Here's what you'll get
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Central policy library
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Search and filter tools
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Mandatory read policies with attestations
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Quizzes
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Notifications and alerts
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Employee dashboard
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Line manager dashboard
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Works on mobile, in Teams and SharePoint
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New policy creation workflows
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Policy update workflows
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Review and approval gates
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Policy version history
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Compliance dashboard
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Audit trail
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Full reporting
And last but not least:
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Professional implementation service and support
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Evergreen software – frequent updates and improvements
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Comes with our "it just works" support warranty – we’ll fix any bugs, often before you even notice
Ready to get started?
Connect with us to streamline your policy management and ensure effortless compliance.
AppSource review
Uniting excellence in integration and features for seamless policy management
Rian Stuart
IT Manager
TwinStream
