Free preview: Information Security Policy

Business Context

[Company Name] operates an online retail business built on [Shopify / WooCommerce / a custom storefront platform], with payment processing handled by one or more payment service providers (PSPs) such as [PSP name]. The business collects and stores customer names, contact details, delivery addresses, order histories, and account credentials, and it shares defined subsets of customer data with marketing, analytics, and fulfillment partners. Demand is seasonal: traffic and order volume during peak trading periods such as [Black Friday through the December holidays] can reach [10] times baseline, which concentrates both revenue and risk into short windows where downtime, fraud, and operational mistakes are most expensive.

The threat environment for this business model is specific and well documented: credential stuffing against customer accounts, card testing and refund fraud through the checkout, skimming code injected into storefront pages or third-party scripts, phishing against staff with storefront administrator access, and data leakage through over-permissioned marketing integrations. This policy and its supporting documents are written to address these risks directly rather than generically.

Information Security Principles

All security decisions at [Company Name] must be consistent with the following principles. Where a proposed action conflicts with a principle, the conflict must be raised to the [Information Security Officer] before proceeding.

• Customer trust is the product: protecting customer personal data and payment integrity takes priority over marketing convenience or short-term conversion gains.
• Minimize what we hold: the business must not collect, export, or retain customer data beyond what a documented business purpose requires, and must never store full payment card numbers on its own systems.
• Least privilege by default: access to the storefront admin, order data, and customer records must be limited to the roles that need it, reviewed at a defined frequency, and removed promptly when no longer needed.
• Availability is a security objective: during peak trading periods, changes to the storefront and its integrations must be controlled so that security and uptime are protected together, not traded against each other.
• Suppliers carry our risk: every app, plugin, PSP, and marketing tool connected to the storefront must be assessed and managed under the Supplier and Cloud Services Security Policy before it touches customer data.
• Verify, do not assume: security controls must be testable, and compliance with this policy must be checked through reviews, logs, and internal audit rather than self-declaration alone.

Information Security Objectives

The [Information Security Officer] must maintain measurable information security objectives, report performance against them to executive management at least [quarterly], and propose corrective actions where targets are missed. The objectives below are the baseline set; they must be reviewed and re-approved at least annually as part of the management review.

Roles and Responsibilities

Information security responsibilities are assigned as follows. Each named role must be filled by an identified individual; where the organization is too small to separate roles, the same person may hold more than one role, but the combination must be recorded and approved by the [Chief Executive Officer] with compensating oversight noted in the risk register.