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Global standards body certifies the reporting agency’s data and cloud systems.
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CreditorWatch earns ISO security sign-off
07 July 2022
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10 minute read
Reporting agency CreditorWatch has earned gold standard data security ratings from the ISO after almost a year of work and intense scrutiny by the standards body.
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ISO certifications 27001 and 27017 are globally recognised as the highest standards for information security management and cloud security controls.
“They endorse our ability to manage the security of assets such as financial information, intellectual property, employee details and information entrusted by third parties,” CreditorWatch said.
Chief executive Patrick Coghlan said the ISO sign-offs had involved a lot of effort and were “a big deal”.
“It’s not easy certification to come by,” Mr Coghlan said. “It took nine to 12 months worth of work, with physical inspections of the property where your offices are, technical penetration testing, and you have to have all your procedures and policies in place.”
CreditorWatch is currently one of only two credit reporting bureaus in Australia collecting ATO tax debt default data and Mr Coghlan said the ISO certificates would eventually be mandated for access to the Tax Office’s modernised business registers.
“Information brokers like CreditorWatch – which have API access and the ability to pull a huge amount of data and store it within our own system – they want to ensure that end-to-end security and continuity is top shelf,” he said.
“We made a conscious effort about 12 months ago to get that certification because it’s obviously really from important data security perspective, but also, from our reputation perspective.”
The certification lasts for five years with annual reviews and was increasingly a requirement for businesses handling sensitive data.
“When we’re dealing with banks or large, public companies, multinational corporations, this is quite often a mandatory certification in order to be able to be a supplier to them,” he said.
“It’s certainly a massive step up for us. There are certain deals that we basically can’t win without it. But it also increases the brand equity and trust that makes us a more reputable, safer business to do business with.”
CreditorWatch claims its systems have a leading uptime figure of 99.9 per cent, meaning its service are available 24/7.
It said it had invested “significant resources” into making its systems available without interruption and was now “the only credit reporting bureau able to deliver live updates to this standard”.
“When we deliver updates, new products or features, it always happens in real-time without any disruptions; our customers continue operating with zero downtime,” the company said.
The CreditorWatch system is completely cloud-based and has been operating for almost nine years.
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