Compliance Support Overview – ISO 27001, PCI DSS, Cyber Essentials, NIST, SOC 2

Compliance Support Guidance

PrimoConnect helps customers by providing experienced compliance support consultancy, software & training solutions for respected data security certifications, standards and regulations including ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials / Cyber Essentials Plus, SOC2, NIST and PCI DSS, . We support national & international clients with standards, management systems & compliance.

ISO 27001:2022

ISO 27001:2022 (ISO 27001) provides a framework of policies, procedures and controls to address legal, physical and technical information security risks to your business. Based on the Annex SL ISO 27001 can be easily implemented with existing Standards such as ISO 9001 or operate as a standalone system.

ISO 27001 is suitable for any organisation that wants to improve Information security and build a culture of continual improvement. ISO 27001 is the worlds most recognised Information Security Management System and is seen as the global Gold Standard in information security.

Cyber Essentials / Cyber Essentials Plus

Two of the best known cyber certifications available are Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus.  Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus help you to guard against the most common cyber threats and demonstrate your commitment to cyber security.  Our consultants run through a gap-analysis exercise and subsequent guidance to help prepare your business to become Cyber Essentials (Plus) certified.

SOC 2

SOC 2 is a voluntary compliance standard for service organisations, developed by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), which specifies how organisations should manage customer data. The standard is based on the following Trust Services Criteria: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, privacy.

Service organisations are usually required to gain SOC 2 compliance in order to partner with or provide services to other companies. The main benefit of SOC 2 compliance is that it demonstrates that your organisation maintains a high level of information security. The rigorous compliance requirements, which are put to the test in an on-site audit, ensure that sensitive information is being handled responsibly. Organisations that implement the necessary controls are therefore less likely to suffer data breaches or violate users’ privacy. This protects the organisation from the negative effects of breaches, such as regulatory action and reputational damage, and gives them a competitive advantage.

SOC 2-compliant organisations can use this fact to prove to customers that they’re committed to information security, which in turn will create new business opportunities. That’s because the framework states that compliant organisations can only share data with other organisations that have passed the audit.

NIST Framework

Understand your security strengths and weaknesses and see the path forward with our NIST Framework audit. This assessment is a thorough, comprehensive review of your security infrastructure that leaves no stone unturned. This assessment, led by our experienced cyber security experts, helps you to determine what technologies and security controls are operating effectively.

See the weaknesses, vulnerabilities and gaps in your security infrastructure and formulate a robust strategy to strengthen and improve your protection.

PCI DSS

One of the biggest barriers to managed services adoption is data security, with seventy-one per cent of respondents saying it was an important concern to consider before migrating to a cloud provider. PrimoConnect can assist with Google Cloud PCI compliance, AWS PCI compliance and Microsoft Azure PCI compliance.

For businesses reliant on e-commerce, the safeguarding of customer financial data is crucial in retaining customer trust. Without it nobody will buy from you, and it doesn’t matter who it is in the e-commerce transactional chain who messes up; if a customer bought from your site, any problems will be blamed on you.

Consequently the thinking amongst many IT managers seems to be that the closer data and process is to their chests, the safer it is, so they try to keep as much in-house as possible.

However, this logic isn’t necessarily sound. While everyone in a the e-commerce transaction chain (below) must be PCI DSS compliant in their own right, the burden of actually making sure all the key tenets of PCI DSS compliancy are enforced all the time, along with the management of internal infrastructure produces more pressure on in-house IT departments, ultimately leading to data security issues.