docSAFE is now ISO27001 accredited and – as the proud family – we are very pleased.
The whole point of an external body looking at what you do and how you do it is a huge sanity check. You can get caught up in your own bubble, especially if you create a product or service that is successful in a particular sector – for us it’s professionals (accountants, solicitors, financial services and some education). You focus on the product and how you develop it, keeping ahead of trends and requirements, motivated largely by client requests and needs.
To have a completely independent organisation with the authority and standards of ISO go through your processes and systems and give it the green light is important to us. We worked together over a fairly long period of time, refining and enhancing until we had ticked every last box.
It’s not the ISO accreditation we are proud of, it’s the end result and our clients’ satisfaction. After all, that’s all that really matters. But it doesn’t hurt to get it checked and approved externally by an organisation who has no interest in your business – beyond helping it improve.
To alleviate some of the worry or concern that the media (and social media in particular) is stirring up around the subject of GDPR, we have found a great resource that outines everything you need to know in an easy to digest format. It is produced by the ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office) and gives you a link to the different applications for GDPR. So, if you are a GDPR controller, marketer, processor or even the person who looks after the CCTV records, there is a link and checklist to help you work towards compliancy.
Your website – you may be quietly thinking that your website wouldn’t be of interest to a hacker – after all, you’re just a medium sized accountancy firm minding your own business. However – hackers do and can access your website for more than just the data. We were asked to look at a brand new client site recently and found hundreds of hidden links that took visitors away from the website. We soon sorted out a new website with extra layers of security to prevent it happening again.
Our portfolio of services is all based around security and communications starting with our client portfolio, docSAFE. This allows professionals to manage all of their communications from a central place – like a virtual filing cabinet. We have implemented several layers of security which means that your information is safe – and more importantly for your business, your clients’ data is safe.
When we first developed docSAFE, our secure client portal for professional firms, we were definitely thinking about addressing the issue of exchanging sensitive data in the most effective way – in a way that can’t be compromised and leave our professional clients open to hackers and human errors.