# Interested parties

The people and organisations that can affect, or are affected by, your management system, such as customers, staff, regulators and key suppliers.

Source: https://sted.digital/docs/glossary/interested-parties · Last reviewed 17 October 2026 · Strand Glossary

Interested parties are the people and organisations that can affect your management system, are affected by it, or believe they are: customers, staff, regulators, investors, insurers and key suppliers. The standards ask you to name the relevant ones and write down what each requires of you, because those requirements shape your scope, risks and objectives.

## Where the term appears

ISO 27001:2022 4.2, ISO 9001:2015 4.2 and ISO 42001:2023 4.2 each ask you to determine the relevant interested parties and their relevant requirements. The 2022 edition of ISO 27001 adds a step: decide which of those requirements your ISMS will address (ISO 27001:2022 4.2 c)). Its 2024 amendment adds a note that some parties may have climate-related requirements. ISO 13485 has no such clause. It speaks instead of customer and applicable regulatory requirements, which top management must make sure are determined and met (ISO 13485:2016 5.2).

### Not everyone with an opinion

In ISO vocabulary "stakeholder" means the same thing. The work is in the word relevant: an auditor looks for parties tied to requirements you can act on, the requirements themselves rather than a list of names, and evidence that changes in them were reviewed at [management review](/docs/glossary/management-review). The [ISO 27001 context page](/docs/standards/iso-27001/context) covers clause 4.

## How Sted uses it

When onboarding finishes, Sted drafts the management systems, scope, interested parties and compliance obligations registers from your answers, labels each drafted row "Derived from your onboarding answers" until someone edits it, and never overwrites an edited row; issues, objectives, risks and opportunities, and processes start empty, every register hangs off a management system, nothing is deleted, and only issues, objectives and risks can be retired.

## Related terms

- [ISMS](/docs/glossary/isms): the management system whose scope the parties' requirements shape.
- [QMS](/docs/glossary/qms): where customers are the interested party that matters most.
- [Management review](/docs/glossary/management-review): where changes in their needs are considered.
- [Documented information](/docs/glossary/documented-information): how their requirements are usually kept.