iomart has become one of the first UK cloud providers to adopt the
new international standard on cloud privacy which has been created to
establish a uniform worldwide approach to protecting personal data in
the public cloud.
ISO/IEC 27018 is a code of practice that has been developed by the
International Organization for Standardization (ISO). iomart will
incorporate the new international standard into its Information
Management System and work with customers to keep Personally
Identifiable Information (PII) private and secure by delivering its
services in a way that allows both parties to meet the requirements of
applicable legislation and regulations covering the protection of PII.
Angus MacSween, CEO of iomart, said: “iomart works to the very highest
standards in delivering hosting solutions for our customers. For many of
them data security, privacy and legal compliance is of the utmost
importance. We have therefore worked hard to become one of the first
adopters of this new international data security standard. Not only can
we can tell our customers exactly where there data is, we can ensure
there is no unauthorised access to it and that the way it is handled
meets all relevant privacy obligations.”
iomart provides a range of public, private and hybrid cloud solutions to
a range of customers from a network of data centres across the UK and a
series of international Points of Presence. Its customers are
increasingly looking to cloud backup and disaster recovery as part of
their data storage strategies which involves protecting many petabytes
of data for them away from their business premises.
Bill Strain, CTO of iomart, added: “Microsoft is one of the first global
cloud providers to announce that it has adopted ISO/IEC 27018 and as a
Tier 1 member of the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Program iomart is
proud to be operating to the same high standards. Privacy is still a key
issue for businesses looking to move to the cloud so being able to offer
our services with this level of confidence in how we protect data for
our customers is an important step.”
The new
international standard focuses on protecting personal data in the
cloud by specifying minimum security measures that must be implemented
for customers including encryption and access controls and security
awareness policies for staff.
iomart has also adopted two other international cloud computing
standards, ISO/IEC 17788 and ISO/IEC 17789, which were published late in
2014. These standards draw on the knowledge of experts from over 30
countries and lay down the basic terminology and architectural framework
for the delivery of Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service
(PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).