What is CSOP?
The acronym CSOP refers to Cybersecurity Standardized Operating Procedures. A set of Standardized Operating Procedures (SOP) is a common way to document procedures, and a CSOP is a cybersecurity-focused SOP.
Documented procedures are one of the most overlooked requirements in cybersecurity compliance, but procedures are also a minimum expectation that an auditor is going to look for. For anyone who has written procedures, the answer for why companies routinely fail to maintain procedures is clear, since it can take considerable time and effort to properly document processes. Part of that problem is tied to a lack of best practices around what good procedures look like, where every organization tends to do something different, based on internal staff preferences or auditor pressure. This leads to a lack of standardization across departments and business functions, which can be an issue when trying to maintain "what right looks like" if a benchmark does not exist.