“What am I looking at here?” Tony Montana asks George Sheffield that question during the classic gangster film Scarface after being arrested for tax evasion. Theoretically, Tony knows what he’s up against, but he wants his lawyer to be specific and explicit, so he knows exactly.

In the famed series Lord of the Rings, the unlikely hero Frodo Baggins offers to carry the terrible burden of the One Ring to Mordor in order to destroy it and save all of Middle Earth from evil. Immediately after he makes this decision, he says, “Though I do not know the way.”

Someone once said that "a marathon is hundreds of miles. The finish is the last 26.2." Maybe that “someone” worked at the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) because they are coming to the “finish” at the end of their latest marathon, though it’ll still take some work and time to get over the line.

In the film classic, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, our hero Indy tries to beat the booby trap security in a cave to steal a golden idol. He thinks he’s won when he switches the idol for a similarly sized bag of sand, but then finds he has to navigate flying darts, a dropping wall, and a chasm before he’s through.

In the legendary Lord of the Rings series, leaders from different societies create a fellowship of nine different people tasked with saving Middle-Earth. The idea wasn’t originally to send nine, and there were obvious reservations about trusting some of the Fellowship with such a serious mission. (Looking at you, Pippin.)

Think about the last time you went to a restaurant—what did you order? Was it your usual, or did you see a new addition to the menu that intrigued you so much you pulled the trigger and tried it?

You’ve likely heard the phrase “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”—or at least something like it, and the sentiment is true. It’s incredibly helpful to understand what pitfalls or stumbles occurred in the past so that the same traps aren’t fallen into, and it’s even more helpful when someone compiles a list of those pitfalls that more easily lay them all out.

Introduction ISO/IEC 27001:2015 (ISO 27001) certification is becoming more of a conversation in most major businesses in the United States. To provide some depth, there was a 20% increase in ISO 27001 certificates maintained globally (comparing the numbers from 2014 to 2015 as noted in the recent ISO survey). As for North America, there was a 78% growth rate in ISO 27001 certificates maintained, compared to those in North America in 2014. So it is clear evidence that the compliance effort known as ISO 27001 is making its imprint on organizations in the United States. However, it’s just the beginning. Globally, there are 27,563 ISO 27001 certificates maintained, of which only 1247 are maintained in the United States; that is 4.5% of all ISO 27001 certificates.