Being ISO certified shows customers that your enterprise is committed to using systems and following processes that boost the quality of your products and services. While customers will be assured, your teams may be worried about the task ahead. To achieve certification, they’ll need to undergo multiple audits.
This probably sounds like a lot of additional work at a time when your teams are buckling under the strain of supporting a more disparate end user base and an ever-more complex IT estate. There are ways to gain buy-in and make ISO certification less of a headache.
There are several ISO information security standards that IT organizations can benefit from. Including:
So, how does ISO certification benefit IT?
Suddenly announcing IT is going to go for certification isn’t likely to make teams happy. Involving them from the start will help to gain buy-in and allow you to deal with any resistance or questions from an early stage.
To get you through the many and regular audits, you need to maintain robust records of your processes and provide documented evidence on how they are being followed. Given the number of disparate tools and systems that your IT teams interact with, that can be a lot of work. These tools manage distinct areas of your IT estate, and they aren’t designed to interact with each other. So, like the many other tasks IT manages, much of the work to maintain records will be handled manually.
We all know how time consuming and risky this is. There’s a chance for errors to creep in or steps to be missed. Your organization isn’t static but your project data will be if you are using manual process to maintain it. The longer it takes to collect and analyze data, the more out of date it will be, adding further risk both to your ISO certification and any program you manage using this data.
Morgan Stanley found out just how costly lapses in data protection can be. A third-party vendor used by Morgan Stanley as part of a data center decommissioning program failed to erase data from servers and hardware before they were sent to a recycler. Later a few decommissioned servers containing customer information went missing from a local branch. Although the issue was caused by a third party, it was found that Morgan Stanley hadn’t properly supervised the vendor or maintained adequate documentation. As a result, in addition to being subject to a number of class-action lawsuits, it was issued with a $60 million civil money penalty by the US OCC.
To reduce the time and effort of documenting processes for ISO audits, consider implementing a digital platform conductor (DPC). A DPC connects to all your disparate tools, and extracts, aggregates and cleans the information held within them in real time to provide a holistic view of your IT estate. Further leveraging two-way connectors, a DPC will update your existing databases with correct data to ensure all your records are up to date.
A digital platform conductor not only affords you greater visibility across your IT estate, but also allows you to take advantage of orchestration capabilities, triggering your disparate IT management tools to automate your IT processes and workflows. As tasks are completed the DPC stores a digital record. Reduced reliance on manual entry means reduced errors and you have easy access to detailed reports for ISO audits. This is even extended to work completed outside of your organization as third-party tasks can also be automatically recorded, to make sure that programs such as IT asset disposition (ITAD) are managed using appropriate processes.
By leveraging automation, you don’t just retain detailed records across all your IT programs, but you can accelerate the time to completion, reducing risk of ISO audits and across your entire IT estate.
Book a demo with ReadyWorks to see how to leverage automated processes to accelerate IT programs, reduce risk and cut the time and effort of ISO audits.
