ISO 27001 and why it is important to the security of your business

We discuss how Wanstor is helping customers achieve ISO 27001 accreditation in order to protect their business.

As the task of keeping your business safe against cyber-attacks diversifies and becomes increasingly challenging, you might be beginning to wonder about the additional things you could be doing to ensure you have a resilient environment against cyber-attacks. Looking at the next step in managing your IT security and protecting your information and data, and what that looks like going forward is likely to be a key consideration.

One way in which businesses are protecting themselves is through ISO 27001 certification, which is an international standard for information security management. It’s an incredibly well-recognised international standard for information security and covers the best-practice, towards achieving a systematic approach to improving and managing how organisations secure their data assets such as financial information, intellectual property, customer data, employee details and more.

ISO 27001 provides a great framework for getting - and keeping you - on track as well as highlighting to providers, partners and customers that you adhere to the standards set within the accreditation. As well as delivering and assessing Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus, and a whole suite of security solutions to help keep our customers safe, we have recently started to provide consultancy services to some of our customers looking to achieve ISO 27001 accreditation.

ISO 27001 is a great accreditation to work towards for a mix of reasons, including the extensive areas of security it covers, the credibility and commitment the accreditation body has to ensuring that the processes are followed correctly, as well as the yearly audits which make sure businesses continue to adhere to the standards set within the accreditation and are resilient to a security breach.

We’re accredited ourselves so know the work that goes into it but also the benefits it brings. We are delighted, therefore, to be able to add extra value to the customers we already support. For some businesses, it can be a tough and lengthy process, and it’s not something that can be done lightly or quickly and it’s constrained by the resources available, but it is something that can be done well to make the best use of time with help from a team experienced in such projects.

Our Contracts and Compliance Manager Heather Drummond, who has been leading our ISO 27001 consultancy service and getting our customers through their accreditation says: "ISO 27001 is a great resource, acting as both a teacher and assessor because it doesn’t just dictate whether a business has the right security in place."

"It helps to define objectives for the company such as setting good governance processes, embedding risk assessment into processes, capturing incidents across the business and continually improving in an evidenced way, and how to get there."

We are proud to be one of the few Managed Services Providers that are offering the consultancy services to our customers. It’s important that, in becoming ISO 27001 aligned, everyone in the business, from management down, needs to be involved in the process. As an MSP, we are in a great position to be able to get that done and ensure that the standards set within ISO 27001 are adhered to.

We know every area of our customers’ businesses, we work with both senior leaderships and end-users in a vast array of teams and we also, of course, already know the critical information and data which the customer needs to protect. We’re looking forward to helping more and more organisations get the accreditation and more customers add it to their list of requirements regarding who they can work with.