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Internal Control Review vs. Audit

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An internal control review is an overall assessment of your internal control system throughout all your business units to determine if it’s working as intended and if it can manage the risks your company might face on a daily basis. The term can also refer to the review of a small subset of controls, such as those around a specific process or processes.

An internal audit is an independent, objective assurance, and consulting activity that aims to help organizations accomplish their goals by evaluating and improving the effectiveness of control, risk management, and governance processes, according to the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA).

What is an Internal Control Review?

The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) defines “internal control” as a process used by a company’s board of directors, management, and other employees, to provide reasonable assurance regarding the achievement of the organization’s objectives in the following categories:

  • Effectiveness and efficiency of operations
  • Reliability of financial reporting
  • Compliance with applicable laws and regulations

An internal control review assures your company’s management that its internal control environment is effective. Internal controls protect your company from financial loss, help maintain reliable financial reporting, and enable your organizations to operate more efficiently and securely.

The best way for you to make certain that your internal control system is operating efficiently is with an internal control review. Monitoring and assessing internal controls across various functions is done through continuous evaluations to ensure your internal control system is as effective as it should be. This assessment makes it easier to identify internal control weaknesses so you can correct them.

An internal control review typically tests whether your internal controls are working as designed (design testing) or are operating effectively. Evaluating internal controls involves:

  • Identifying your organization’s internal control objectives
  • Evaluating the relevant policies and procedures and the documentation standards for each of them
  • Discussing the internal controls with management and staff
  • Observing the control environment
  • Comparing documentation of the control with your expectations and with observed design
  • Evaluating whether the control achieves its intended objectives
  • Testing transactions as necessary, if you’re reviewing operating effectiveness, or, for design testing, testing one transaction through the end-to-end process, often called “walkthrough testing”
  • Sharing findings, concerns, and recommendations with the board of directors and/or senior management
  • Determining that your company has taken corrective action on weaknesses that have been identified in a timely manner.

Your internal control review analyst conducts an internal control review to find out if there are any internal control weaknesses in your internal control system. The analyst offers recommendations to help you strengthen your internal controls.

Effective internal controls are your organization’s first line of defense to prevent and detect errors, protect your assets, and mitigate risk. Internal controls let you proactively evaluate and monitor your processes to eliminate weaknesses in a timely manner.

According to the COSO framework, the five components of internal control are:

  • Control environment: This is the set of standards, processes, and structures that provide the basis for carrying out internal control across your organization. Your board of directors and senior management establish the tone regarding the importance of internal control, including your organization’s expected standards of conduct. Management reinforces their expectation regarding internal controls at the various levels of your company.
  • Risk assessment: Includes identifying and analyzing your company’s risks and forms the basis for how risks should be managed. Risk is defined as the possibility that an event will happen and negatively affect your company’s ability to achieve its objectives.
  • Control activities: These are the actions established by the policies and procedures that help ensure management directives to mitigate the risks that hinder your company’s ability to achieve its objectives are carried out. Control activities are performed at all levels of your organization, and at various stages within your business processes, and over the technology environment.
  • Information and communication: This involves identifying, capturing, and exchanging information, including accounting information, that allows your employees to do their jobs.
  • Monitoring: This is the set of processes that management uses to examine and assess whether your company’s internal controls are functioning properly.

Benefits of an Internal Control Review

An internal control review encourages compliance with your organization’s internal control policies and procedures. It also enables your company to operate more effectively and efficiently.

Additionally, an internal control review confirms the reliability of controls for financial reporting and compliance with the applicable laws and regulations. An internal control review also detects and prevents errors and irregularities in a timely manner and provides senior management with a thorough understanding of your company’s internal control procedures.

What Is an Internal Audit?

As defined by the IIA, an internal audit is “an activity that provides independent, objective assurance, and consulting activity designed to add value and improve an organization’s operations. It helps an organization accomplish its objectives by bringing a systematic, disciplined approach to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of risk management, control, and governance processes.”

Auditors who understand their companies’ business cultures, information systems, and processes perform the internal audits to ensure that the internal controls in place adequately mitigate any potential risk. Internal auditors are often employees of their organizations, while external auditors work for outside audit firms.

Internal auditors ensure that their companies have controls in place to comply with the application laws and regulations. They also help their organizations maintain timely and accurate financial reporting and data collection by evaluating whether management is doing so adequately.

Internal auditors generally focus on a process, gathering information from various departments, performing fieldwork testing, following up with employees if they uncover any issues, and preparing an official audit report. The auditors review the report with your company’s leaders, then follow up with management and your board’s audit committee to check that the organization has implemented the recommendations outlined in the report.

The internal audit report provides the tools the business needs to operate more efficiently by uncovering problems and ensuring that those issues are corrected before the external auditors find them.

Your company may also have an audit committee that oversees the internal audit function on behalf of the board of directors. The audit committee will ensure that your internal auditors operate independently from the business and that management supports them.

Benefits of an Internal Audit

Your internal auditor’s main job is to evaluate the behaviors, actions, and results of management regarding governance, risk management, and compliance, and to report its findings to the audit committee of the board of directors. The aim is to provide “reasonable assurance” that GRC tasks are being performed as they should.

Understanding your internal controls helps your internal auditor assess the risks of material misstatement, which then helps in designing and implementing audit responses that are tailored to those assessed risks. Without a proper understanding of your internal controls, your auditor may not identify the risks associated with your internal controls and as such may not design and implement the appropriate responses.

Internal audits also identify redundancies in your business practices and procedures, as well as your governance processes. The auditors recommend how to streamline these practices and procedures, saving you time and money.

In addition, internal audits examine your cybersecurity environment, look for vulnerabilities in your digital systems and networks, and recommend how to close any gaps. Internal audits analyze and scrutinize the processes, people, and tools that support your financial statements and results, verifying their integrity and accuracy.

Internal audits also consider all the identified risks to your company and evaluate whether your risk mitigation procedures work as expected. If they aren’t working properly, the audit reports will tell you what you need to do to resolve any problems.

Additionally, internal audits check the regulations, laws, and industry standards that your company must comply with, and determine whether your organization is complying with them. Quality software such as ZenGRC can perform these audits for you, as often as you’d like. If there are any issues, your internal auditors will recommend how to correct them.

Internal Control Review vs. Internal Audit

An internal audit is a frequent or ongoing audit conducted by your company’s employees. The internal auditor mainly monitors operational results, verifies financial records, evaluates internal controls, and helps improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your operations.

Internal auditors operate objectively, i.e., they try as much as possible to reduce or eliminate bias and prejudice, or they conduct a subjective evaluation by relying on data that they can verify.

An internal control review examines the adequacy and effectiveness of your internal controls processes and makes recommendations if the processes need to be improved.

Since an internal audit should be independent and objective, it isn’t responsible for developing or maintaining internal controls. It’s up to management to implement the policies adopted by the board of directors or the chief executive officer and to identify, evaluate, prevent or mitigate, and control the risks your company could face in achieving its objectives.

However, the review process performed by an internal audit and the recommendations made for improvement enhance the effectiveness of internal control.

Internal control is a business process. An internal control system is an integral part of the financial and business policies that control your company’s strategic, financial, and operational procedures. The process is based on a system of management information, financial regulations, administrative procedures, as well as a system of accountability.

Internal control and risk management represent critical business disciplines that call for your company to identify all the risks it faces, decide which risks it needs to actively manage, and implement a plan of action, i.e., controls to mitigate the risk.

Some experts say that a company could live without an internal audit but couldn’t survive long without effective internal controls. Still, an internal audit and an internal control review add value and improve your organization’s operations, although in different ways.

Why Vulnerability Management is Important

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We are all vulnerable, and becoming more so, it seems. Data breaches and system disruptions due to cyberattacks just keep rising, year after year. Finding and strengthening your cybersecurity weak spots, or vulnerabilities, is key to thwarting these attacks.

A Big Problem, and Growing Fast

Cybercrime has proliferated to such an extent that it hardly makes headlines anymore. Data leaks, defined as “the unauthorized transmission of information from inside an organization to an external recipient(s),” skyrocketed in 2020 by 492%, reaching 27 billion in the first half alone–an all-time high. Typically, data leaks happen from within.

Atlas VPN reported 2,037 publicly reported data breaches in the first half of 2020. In the same period in 2019, 3,800 publicly reported breaches exposed 4.1 billion records, according to Norton. Clearly, vulnerabilities abound.

Managing Your Weaknesses

The most common cybersecurity vulnerabilities, Kaspersky says, occur in technologies and user behaviors. 

Breaches occur, the security company writes, in the following ways:

  • Accidental insiders who inadvertently leak information to an outside location;
  • Malicious insiders who leak data intentionally;
  • Lost or stolen devices containing unencrypted information;
  • Malicious external criminals such as hackers, who may install malware on your systems.

Vulnerability management can help you avoid data leaks and breaches before they start–but to do it right, you must be vigilant. The process begins with vulnerability assessments and it never stops; as soon as you complete one vulnerability assessment, you must begin another. 

A vulnerability assessment helps you identify, evaluate, classify, remediate, and report on security vulnerabilities in operating systems, enterprise applications, browsers, and end-user applications. 

Mind Your Patches

Every year, organizations discover thousands of new cybersecurity vulnerabilities requiring them to patch their operating systems and applications and reconfigure their network security settings. Too often, though, they lack a robust patch management program and fail to apply these patches in time.

Nearly 60 percent of cybersecurity breaches in 2019 may have been completely avoidable, according to the Ponemon Institute–they resulted from companies’ failure to patch known vulnerabilities using readily available patches. 

Of course, the typical corporate network contains thousands of vulnerabilities. Keeping them all patched is an impossible task–but having a vulnerability management plan can ensure that you’re addressing the highest-risk vulnerabilities.  

Vulnerability management gives you a process and the tools to regularly identify and remediate your most critical and high-risk vulnerabilities. 

Compliance Requires It

Vulnerability scanning and vulnerability management are required to achieve compliance with such regulations and industry standards are the International Organization for Standardization’s ISO 27001, Information Security Management Systems (ISMS). 

One of the most widely used standards in the extensive ISO family, ISO 27001 provides guidance on cybersecurity management, including vulnerability management as well as information security risk assessment and risk management.

What Vulnerability Scanning Does

Vulnerability scanning aims to identify any systems that are subject to known vulnerabilities. But it’s not a one-and-done task. You must schedule scans to occur regularly to detect new weaknesses and threats.

A vulnerability scanner scans a network or system, including operating systems, for known weaknesses. A vulnerability scanner can also uncover such issues as improper file sharing, system misconfigurations, and outdated software. 

You should use vulnerability scanners to conduct vulnerability scans at least once a month, but more frequently as needed for critical or high-risk systems. When you conduct vulnerability scanning, you should do so in a random order to ensure potential threats can’t use your schedules to plan cyberattacks.

More frequent scanning will give you greater clarity on the progress of your remediation efforts and help you identify new security risks based on updated vulnerability information. If you don’t scan for vulnerabilities and proactively address any flaws that you discover, it’s likely that your systems will be compromised.

The data these scans produce can be invaluable for your risk management program if you evaluate scan results and remediate accordingly.

The Vulnerability Management Process

Each new vulnerability introduces a security risk to your company. So, it’s important to put a process in place to identify and address vulnerabilities quickly and continually. 

Typically, there are four stages to a vulnerability management program:

  1. Identification

First, identify all the vulnerabilities that exist throughout your IT environment. To do so, you must define your IT assets and find the right vulnerability scanner for each asset.

The vulnerability scanner you’ll use for your web applications will differ from the scanner used to uncover network vulnerabilities. For application security, you will likely need at least two technologies to detect vulnerabilities in open source libraries and in your proprietary code.

Identification is a critical part of vulnerability management that is becoming increasingly challenging as companies’ IT environments grow more extensive, complex, and interconnected. 

  1. Evaluation

After you’ve identified your system’s vulnerabilities, you must evaluate the risks they pose and determine how to manage them. It’s important to understand the risk ratings that your vulnerability management tool provides, such as the Common Vulnerability Scoring System, which provides a numerical (0-10) representation of the severity of a vulnerability.

However, you will also want to understand other real-world risk factors, such as:

  • How easily can someone exploit a particular vulnerability? Is a published exploit code available?
  • Does the vulnerability directly affect the security of your network?
  • What would be the impact to your business if a bad actor exploited the vulnerability?
  • Do you have any existing security protocols that would decrease the likelihood and the consequence of a malicious actor exploiting the vulnerability?

It’s also important for you to know whether any vulnerabilities that you’ve identified are false positives. There are tools and techniques that enable vulnerability validation, such as penetration testing, that can identify false positives so you can focus on the vulnerabilities that pose the biggest risks to your company.

  1. Remediation

After you’ve identified and evaluated the vulnerabilities, you have to determine how to prioritize and address them.

Your vulnerability management tool will likely recommend which remediation technique you should use for each vulnerability. You should check with your security team, system owners, and system administrators to determine the right strategies.

There are three general ways you can remediate the identified vulnerabilities:

  • Remediation: Preventing exploitation by patching, correcting, or replacing code that contains a vulnerability.
  • Mitigation: Reducing the probability or impact of a vulnerability. This is typically a temporary fix that you can use until you can totally remediate the vulnerability.
  • No action: Acknowledging and accepting the vulnerability. Generally, you should only do this when the cost of remediating the vulnerability is much higher than the effect it would have on your business if it was exploited.

After you’ve finished the remediation process, you should perform another scan to determine if the vulnerability was completely resolved.

  1. Reporting

If you routinely conduct vulnerability assessments, you’ll gain greater insight into the effectiveness, speed, and cost of your vulnerability management program.

Most vulnerability management systems let you export the data from your vulnerability scanners so your security team can better understand the security posture of each asset and track it to identify trends, such as increased vulnerability detection.

Consistent reporting will help your security team comply with your company’s risk management key performance indicators as well as with regulatory requirements.

Continuity is Key

Vulnerability management is hard. You have to perform it continually to ensure that all of your systems and applications are always up-to-date and that you identify each new vulnerability as soon as possible.

You may need to change the mindset of your security teams. The best way is to implement continuous processes that will affect their day-to-day work. Periodic testing and remediation just aren’t enough if you want to ensure that you keep on top of your security status. And the most reliable and effective way to manage vulnerabilities continuously is with automation.

The Importance of Prioritization 

The goal of security teams is to fix all the vulnerabilities detected in your company’s assets. However, it’s just about impossible to achieve that goal. Prioritization, therefore, is the key to a successful implementation of a new vulnerability management program. 

You need to ensure that you set clear guidelines for each asset, i.e., which vulnerabilities should be remediated and which should not. Vulnerability management consultants can help define a risk-based prioritization procedure based on your assets and the market.

Under a strong vulnerability management program, each process is viewed as a continual lifecycle aimed at helping to improve security and reduce organizational risk found in a company’s network. 

Get Help if You Need It

Today’s tools can simplify and automate the process of vulnerability management. ZenGRC works with other tools and technologies to collect and store data on your vulnerabilities and tells you what you need to do to resolve them. It tracks tasks so you always know what’s being done and by whom, shows your compliance (including for ISO certification) and risk management stature on user-friendly dashboards, allows unlimited self-audits in a few clicks, and much more.

Worry-free cybersecurity risk management is the Zen way. Contact us today for your free consultation.

PCI DSS Risk Assessment Guidelines

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The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is an information security standard for companies that handle credit and debit cards from the major card brands, whether via e-commerce or in in-person transactions, and those that store or process payment card data.

PCI DSS Requirement 12.2 requires that organizations annually perform formal risk assessments to identify threats, vulnerabilities, and risks to the business, particularly risks to debit and credit card data and their environments. This requirement can help you identify, prioritize, and manage your information security risks.

If you don’t want to get hit with a data breach, you’ll need to close security and PCI DSS compliance gaps. A risk assessment can help you figure out which vulnerabilities you should address first.

A risk assessment helps you anticipate threats and the vulnerabilities associated with those threats that can harm your business. A risk assessment also helps you determine how to implement the controls that can ward off those threats or lessen their effects on your company if they do arise.

Conducting a risk assessment at least annually keeps you up to date with changes in your business. It also enables you to consider those changes in light of new threats, new technologies, and emerging trends. These changes might include introducing a new software application to your cardholder data environment or launching new products or services.  A risk assessment should also be performed when there are significant changes to your organization’s environment such as relocation, merger, or acquisition.

There are a number of industry-accepted risk assessment methodologies that you can use to develop your risk assessment process, according to the PCI Data Security Standard. These include OCTAVE, ISO 27005, and NIST SP 800-30.

Assessing Your PCI DSS Risks

Your PCI DSS risk assessment should include:

  • The types of risk that may exist in your systems, applications, or processes
  • Company assets that need protection from these risks
  • Your entity’s level of vulnerability to each risk 
  • The likelihood that each risk will materialize (that a threat will occur)
  • The impact on your organization if a threat should occur
  • How your company can reduce the likelihood of threats and their impact. 

According to the PCI Security Standards Council, these are the steps you should follow when conducting your PCI DSS risk assessment:

  1. Develop a Risk Assessment Team and Methodology. Establish a risk assessment team with people from every department, including those that process, store, and transmit cardholder data. Appoint a team leader who understands the PCI DSS requirements and the risk assessment methodology.

    Adopt a methodology that fits with your company’s culture and the current business climate so you can be sure to meet your risk objectives.
  2. Identify Your Risks.  “Risk” refers to the likelihood that a threat will materialize, often due to a vulnerability. “Risk level” refers to the potential impact that threat will have on your company and your customers.

    For example, a system that employs weak passwords is vulnerable to the threat that a bad actor could compromise user credentials and break into the system. Your company is at risk if you store cardholder data that are not encrypted in your system.

    When threats are likely to take advantage of a vulnerability, therein lies your risk.

The PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) lists four areas of focus in the risk-identification process:

  • Context establishment: Understanding the “the organization’s hierarchy, business processes, cardholder data (CHD) flows, and any associated system components”
  • Asset identification: The “the people, processes, and technologies that are involved in the processing, storage, transmission, and protection of CHD.” This step also involves identifying who is responsible for protecting each critical asset and may include assigning a value to each depending on its importance to the business.
  • Threat identification: Anyone or anything that could cause harm to the organization is a threat. The PCI SSC suggests talking with people throughout the company to compile a comprehensive list. Reviewing past threats can also help pinpoint those most likely to occur in the future.
  • Vulnerability identification: Part of vulnerability management, this step involves pinpointing weaknesses or potential weaknesses that threat actors could exploit, such as payment channels and devices. The PCI SSC recommends using vulnerability assessment reports, penetration-testing reports, and technical security audits such as firewall rule reviews, secure code reviews, and database configuration reviews.
  1. Determine Your Risk Levels. Which risks stand to affect your organization? Prioritizing these risks and their potential impacts is a key part of your risk assessment, ultimately guiding your risk management strategy.

The PCI SSC recommends ranking risks according to:

  • The ability of the “threat agent” to carry out the threat
  • The threat agent’s intent
  • The threat’s relevance to the enterprise
  • The likelihood of its occurring
  • The damage that it could cause to the organization.

Next, assign a risk level to every vulnerability and every threat that’s associated with the vulnerability, i.e., high, medium, or low risk. For additional information on the various risk evaluation methods, i.e., quantitative vs. qualitative, see the PCI Security Standards Council’s  PCI DSS Risk Assessment Guidelines.

4. Mitigate Your Risks. It’s nearly impossible to eliminate all your risks. That’s why it’s important to apply controls to reduce the risks to acceptable levels.

Mitigation often includes taking steps to reduce the likelihood that a risk will occur or lessen the severity of loss if it does happen or both. These steps can include implementing operational or technical controls or making changes to your physical environment. For example, you can mitigate the risk of malware by installing anti-malware software. The level of risk that remains is often referred to as “residual risk.”

Mitigation can take several forms: avoiding the risk, perhaps by discontinuing the activity that has created it; transferring the risk, for instance with insurance; reducing the risk, or accepting the risk, especially if the likelihood of its occurring or its potential impact on your business is low.

Reporting the Results

Each risk assessment should result in a risk assessment report that details the risk you’ve identified, including those affecting the cardholder data environment (CDE). The goal of the report is to clearly state the various risks that concern your company. The report may also explain the actions you took to remediate these risks.

Your PCI risk assessment report should include the following information:

Scope of your risk assessment: Describe your company as well as the internal and external guidelines you considered when you defined the scope of your risk assessment.

For the purpose of PCI DSS requirements, you can also include an overview of your cardholder data environment and the companies that support and process your cardholder data.

Asset inventory: Create a thorough list of assets that are in the scope of the risk assessment, for example, hardware, software, networking, and communications infrastructure, and employees.

Threats: List the threats that can harm your assets. You can also include a description of each threat that you’ve identified to spell out their characteristics.

Vulnerabilities: List the vulnerabilities related to technology and to your organization that can affect your assets.

Risk evaluation: Describe the technique you used to measure the risks you’ve identified so you can prioritize them.

Risk treatment (mitigation): Document the list of actions you’ve taken for each of the risks you’ve identified, along with how you handled those risks.

Version history: You might want to include the date, author, and the approver of the document.

Executive summary: This details your company’s overall risk posture before and after risk mitigation.

Get Help If You Need It

You should perform an annual risk assessment, at least, and another after you make any significant changes in your network. The risk assessment can offer direction on the vulnerabilities you should address first.

Conducting a risk assessment is often a long process, and only the first step toward PCI compliance. Meeting all the PCI requirements can take many months. Using quality governance, risk management, and compliance software can ease these tasks.

ZenGRC can help you track and manage your risks and to know where you are compliant with PCI DSS, where you fall short, and how to fill gaps. And its “single source of truth” repository keeps all your documentation in one place for easy retrieval at audit time.

Worry-free PCI DSS compliance is the Zen way. Contact us today for your free consultation.

Automate Evidence Gathering with Vulnerability Management Integration

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Evidence gathering for vulnerability management programs has historically been made up of many manual tasks. Different individuals from separate teams gather information and attempt to consolidate the data to make it usable. 
Vulnerability management programs have been designed to identify, classify, prioritize, remediate, and mitigate vulnerabilities most often found in software. One can imagine the sheer amount of data involved in the vulnerability management process and the next steps that come after a vulnerability assessment or vulnerability scanning. 

Many organizations use the data collected to feed information technology security, risk management programs, application patching, attack surface reduction, and operating systems patching. One can see the lure of automating evidence gathering via vulnerability management integration when so many other processes depend on it.

Vulnerability Management Solutions

Vulnerability scanning is at the core of a cybersecurity and vulnerability management program. 

Scanning enables information security teams to find vulnerabilities at a scale manual evaluation is unable to compete with. Vulnerability scanners evaluate security vulnerabilities, operating systems, and web applications looking for security risks and common vulnerabilities. 

Evidence gathering is a key component here as it enables the prioritization of vulnerability data. The ability to tie vulnerability data and threat intelligence together in an automated fashion is what gives mature security teams the ability to execute security controls and resolve Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE).

How to Automate Evidence Gathering with Vulnerability Management Integration

Automated evidence gathering allows organizations to gather as much information and evidence about different types of attacks and malicious activities as possible. 

Vulnerability management software and vulnerability management tools are on the front line acting as the scan engine for threat detection. Integrating the evidence collected with a Governance, Risk, and Compliance solution (GRC) like ZenGRC is critical to take actionable steps towards timely vulnerability remediation. 

There are several security frameworks like NIST CSF, PCI, ISO, and SOC 2 that help IT security personnel builds robust security controls that leverage collected evidence for remediation purposes. However, the real power comes from the integration between GRC platforms and vulnerability management. Most often, the integration comes in the form of a plugin that facilitates communication between GRC and the vulnerability management system. 

While a plugin enables the capability, there is often configuration that must be done. It is recommended that organizations automating evidence gathering with vulnerability management integration look for a GRC platform with out of the box pre-configured rules that are easy to leverage and replicate for additional use cases.

Summary
Automated evidence gathering with vulnerability management integration ultimately aims to ease vulnerability remediation. To act on detected vulnerabilities, the system needs evidence to tag the vulnerabilities and prioritize them for remediation. 

Following a cybersecurity framework like the NIST CSF aids not only in IT security but detecting vulnerabilities in the first place. Automation allows organizations to exponentially scale the manual steps of identification, classification, prioritization, remediation, and mitigation. 

The key to automating evidence gathering is having the right GRC and vulnerability management platform that has a robust connector between them.

September 2020: Compliance Certification Roundup

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Each month, ZenGRC highlights companies that have earned compliance certifications for information security frameworks. Here’s our September 2020 roundup of recent compliance news from around the United States and around the world.

PCI Certification 

PCI certification and compliance are two different, but related, designations.
PCI certification is a more rigorous process. It involves an intensive audit performed by a Qualified Security Assessor (QSA).
PCI compliance means a company follows best practices to help protect Cardholder Data (CHD) following the guidelines set by the PCI Council.

ISO Certification 

ISO standards concern many industries. The three primary ISO standards that help organize compliance for companies looking to create IT programs: IT, ISO 27001, ISO 31000, and ISO 9001.

SOC 2 Certification

SOC 2 concerns all organizations and enterprises providing services that process and store customer data. SOC 2 reports are based on five Trust Services Criteria: security, availability, confidentiality, processing integrity, and privacy.

FedRAMP Certification

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), is a government program that determines if the cloud products and services offered by cloud service providers are secure enough to be used by federal agencies. 

HIPAA Compliance

Compliance with the Federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) ensures that health care organizations protect the privacy, security, and integrity of protected health information.