ISO is the International Organisation for Standardisation, the largest developer of voluntary industry accreditations in the world. ISO qualifications are held with high regard in hundreds of different markets and sectors in hundreds of countries, meaning these standards are internationally recognised.
The ISO provides a few accreditations relevant to businesses in different sectors, but two of the most important of these are their ISO 9001 for business quality and ISO 27001 for information security management.
ISO 9001 can be achieved if a company satisfies seven different quality management principles:
1. Customer focus – How dedicated is the business to going above and beyond to satisfy customers’ needs?
2. Leadership – how effective are senior managers in communicating and
implementing important decisions within the company?
3. Engagement of people – can leaders engage their workers and clients to care about the company?
4. Process approach – how efficient is the work your company does within its order fulfilment chain?
5. Improvement – is your company constantly trying to improve itself to provide better services and goods to customers?
6. Evidence-based decision making – Does leadership use data and facts to back up high-level decision-making?
7. Relationship management -The relationships that organisations develop with customers, partners, suppliers, and other parties help to support the quality of their products and services. This gives them the feedback they need to improve their processes and quality management system.
Only when a business has satisfied all these areas are they given the ISO 9001 stamp of approval.
ISO 27001 works to a similar system, but the areas that must be met include good resistance to penetration testing, making sure data is handled according to government regulations and judging cloud security standards.
ISO accreditation isn’t inexpensive; this means that only businesses who have real confidence in the quality of their work and processes take the risk to pay the fee for the auditing process to get ISO accredited.
When a business gets ISO certified, it’s a sure sign that the company is putting its services and customers before anything else, meaning clients won’t have to worry about the quality of the goods or services that they’ll be receiving.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, an ISO certification can provide huge boosts to businesses, including increased revenue, reputation, customer satisfaction and supplier relationships.
Here at DataGardener, we recently received ISO accreditations for both overall business quality (9001) as well as information security management (27001).
Our commitment to providing the best service we possibly can and catering for our customers and their needs has allowed us to achieve the ISO 9001 accreditation, affirming our position as one of the leading providers of business data in the UK. Alongside this, our ISO 27001 accreditation means our data security conforms to all UK data laws and is perfectly optimised to keep your data completely safe from harm.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.