PFIKS develops 'Intelligus', a cyber secure social collaboration tool that fully-supports ISO27001

ISO/IEC 27001 is an international specification that sets out the requirements for businesses and organisations throughout the world to develop an information security management system (ISMS), paying due diligence and doing what senior management determines is necessary to protect its data and related information resources.

In 2009, PFIKS selected IT Governance to help the organisation address the detailed information security requirements set out in a contract awarded by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC).

IT Governance consultant, Nick Orchiston, was tasked with providing consultancy to the project team, led by Executive Director, Howard Jones. The aim was to achieve accredited certification to the ISO27001 standard within 3 months, demonstrating compliance and providing reassurance to PFIKS’s government and large corporate clients, including HMRC.

It builds on the conceptual ideas of popular social media, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and adds the functionality of public and private project workspaces, but with a host of enterprise-ready features (document sharing and workflow, secure authentication, document level security etc.) to make it cyber secure, private, collaborative and business integration-friendly. The purpose of this innovative software, recently chosen by the Local Government Association (knowledgehub.local.gov.uk) and the Department for Business Innovation & Skills (BIS), is to achieve:

Internal Collaboration

Driving smart working practices that allow colleagues to work effectively together, to disseminate knowledge, to create knowledge hubs, to discuss issues collectively and resolve problems in double quick time.

External Collaboration

Linking organisations with their key partners, stakeholders or clients. Collaborating on joint projects, holding on-line discussions on key issues affecting each organisation. Getting feedback from customers and consumers as and when issues arise, in real time.

Collective Collaboration

When something needs to be done or agreed on, trying to get everyone into the same meeting room can simply take too long or simply isn't practical. Intelligus links up your colleagues, partners, customers and consumers in one collective collaborative environment and shares information, knowledge, viewpoints and comments so that everyone is working for the same goals in a co-ordinated, collaborative way. On-line, when it is needed, without delay.

Link up with the outside world

Live feeds from other social networks and news feeds will expand knowledge from beyond the tight circle of work contacts people work with on a day-to-day basis. It also allows you to tap into what is being talked about in that larger circle, however wide you draw it.

“I wanted to instil an attitude of diligence in our development team, and awareness that following the principles of 27001 would improve our efficiency and lower our support costs. The goal was to establish the credentials of Intelligus as a social business software solution that could be trusted, either as a SaaS or “on-premise” service. By showing compliance, and certification, to ISO27001 we felt would help address concerns that larger organisations have about placing services outside their firewall, or alternatively, give them assurance that the software they were deploying inside their firewall was “safe”. Government organisations across the world have a duty to be cyber resilient, and hence cannot afford to be lax over security policies.”

“We also needed to gain an accredited ISO27001 certificate to prove compliance ourselves; as part of our marketing strategy for Intelligus. We started to adopt the A.11 control set, but then realised that our control choices should really be based on a thorough and professional risk assessment … so that we knew what was going to work, not only for us, but our clients using our software with more involved IT setups and the issues of large organisations in terms of implementing security policies. We have ambitious plans, and putting these controls in place early would ensure that we could manage that growth.”

“The Directors talked it over: we decided that ISO27001 was sufficiently important to our future to use it to achieve improved ways of working within our company and adhere to our security policy and procedures in a completely committed way. We wanted to say to clients: “We educate our staff in ISO27001 policies, procedures and the controls that we adopt because we believe in the management systems approach. Our information security is the best because we manage and deliver our client assignments using a standards-based approach.” In the circumstances, hiring IT Governance consultants to help us complete the process leading to certification was a no brainer. They made us think about everything that we thought we knew, and using their experience of over 100 successful certifications, told us exactly what we required to make ISO27001 work in our situation.”

“My whole team and I are proud of our coveted ISO27001 certification and the way that we achieve secure results for corporate and public sector clients who use Intelligus. In our thinking, the quality and credentials of Intelligus grew out of the ISO27001 standard as much as it did from the collaborative workspace requirements of our clients, who all share our enthusiasm!”