Knowledge

4/7/2022

HITRUST Certification

Why HITRUST?  

HITRUST develops risk and compliance management frameworks, assessment, and assurance methodologies, maintains them, and provides access to them, being in collaboration with the leaders of information security and risk management, both from the public and private sectors. HITRUST aims to fill the gaps still not addressed by some regulations.

HITRUST Common Security Framework addresses security, privacy, and regulatory challenges organizations face. HITRUST includes and cross-references numerous globally recognized standards, follows a risk-based approach, and creates the options for a well-orchestrated unified method of managing data protection compliance. This makes HITRUST highly beneficial for those organizations seeking to safeguard the data, but this also makes HITRUST not easily implementable for those businesses that still require staff training and bringing all the processes to higher standards to implement HITRUST. Digital Edge is the right partner in achieving this goal.

Why Digital Edge?

Digital Edge follows a belief that cybersecurity can be a decisive advantage for our customers. We are eager to act as a key assistant to our customers on their way to certification. We guarantee that you will be able to go through the certification process, and we will guide you through the stages:

 

 

Each step in this process is vital for successful certification, and Digital Edge will lead the company through all the necessary stages, including the stage of enhancing and increasing the efficiencies within the project, to ensure that the certification is fast and seamless. The task of Digital Edge is to provide the quickest and least expensive journey to certification.

Three of the most essential features of Digital Edge implementation that will work for your advantage in the long term as we go through the certification are the implementation being:  

  • Unintrusive with ongoing business operations;
  • Easily re-certifiable;
  • Advantageous to future business processes and organizational growth.

Multi-Certification Requirements

Certain businesses and organizations are required to be certified many times within many frameworks, depending on their niche and the markets they enter. The more certifications are needed, the harder it is to meet the compliance standards. This is where Digital Edge comes to assistance, being an acknowledged expert in various types of compliance regimes, regardless of the jurisdictions - for the USA, Europe, or Asia. Even if the business has to meet the requirements for more than one compliance regime at the same time, Digital Edge can provide a single solution to master the task for every jurisdiction.

With the help of a single GRC platform, Digital Edge can professionally assist in managing all the risks and strengths within multiple frameworks. This approach will reduce the time, effort, and cost of the whole certification process.

The Process  

H3 Auditor Selection  

Digital Edge is aware that it is crucial to select the right auditor depending on the organization’s size, type of business and niche, internal processes, location of the workforce, etc. The correctly appointed auditor increases the efficiency of the certification and decreases its costs.

Scoping  

The scope of certification also influences the time and cost of the process. Correctly performed scoping will be helpful for the company to reduce the costs and the time necessary; moreover, it will enhance the company’s ability to attract bigger customers in the long term.

Risk Assessment, Gap Analysis  

To determine whether your business has implemented suitable cybersecurity measures, it is necessary to assess the risks. It is impossible to develop an efficient cybersecurity program without being aware of the risks. Therefore, these risks should be determined and the existing gaps analyzed. While risk assessment defines the levels to which the solutions should be used, the gap analysis is helpful for the timing of the process duration and allows to schedule the audit in a more reasonable manner.

Implementation

The duration of the certification project is an important aspect for our customers, and the proven ability of Digital Edge to see the bigger picture of the scope and details makes this aspect more predictable. If Digital Edge is granted complete control over all aspects, from policy writing to internal audits, the customers will be provided with one comprehensive price for the whole process. Yet, even if Digital Edge is only responsible for one or several aspects, we will ensure that the measures implemented will be organic for the company, auditable, and certifiable.

The most crucial benefit of Digital Edge is that it knows all the complicated questions and the correct answers and all the tricky criteria the auditors will be looking at to grant the certification. Our customers are provided with both technology and documentation and the necessary education for the staff to enhance the organization’s capacities.

Certification

Digital Edge is committed to going through all stages of certification together with your company. As we know exactly what is needed for a successful audition and how to prepare the staff for the audit, our responsibility is to ensure that your certification is successful.

The Team

Project Management

Digital Edge will dedicate an executive project management oversight team for each certification project.

Practice Manager

“Practice Manager” is an expert with considerable legal and cybersecurity background who has several successful certification cases. The Practice Manager of the project will engage the Technology Team, the Policy Writers, and the Auditors to complete their tasks in a well-orchestrated manner.

Technology Team

For the implementation stage of the certification project, our customers will be provided with a full-stack Digital Edge Technology Team. Our Technolgy Team is intimately familiar with the concepts of control maturity, traceability, and auditability. The company boasts vast experience in all cybersecurity products and technologies popular in SMB markets, as Digital Edge partners with cybersecurity software and hardware vendors. As a result, proper technological implementation is what Digital Edge can guarantee, together with the collection and preservation of the artifacts, monitoring, and maturing of the project to the necessary level of performance.

Policy Writer

Digital Edge partners with experts in Policy writing for the relevant industry segment. All policies developed by Digital Edge meet the most advanced standards, are in accord and are compliant with the law of the applicable jurisdictions.

Auditors

Auditors in Digital Edge are certified by the same authorities that grant certifications to the HITRUST auditors, possessing similar knowledge and experience. This way, our customers’ businesses will receive the real-life experience of the HITRUST audit during the preparation stage. Due to the internal audits by Digital Edge, the staff of the customers’ companies receives all the necessary skills for the real audit for HITRUST.

The Technology

Digital Edge offers its outstanding experience with the most widespread technologies, cybersecurity software, and hardware, as well as with the approaches and solutions available on the modern markets. The following are some highlights of our implementations:

Public Cloud Deployments

Digital Edge Compliance and Technology teams are experienced with the Public Cloud Platform services and Digital Edge partners with Azure and AWS with a ‘Cybersecurity’ and ‘Well-Architected Framework’ competency. Efficiency in the Public Cloud also includes a great deal of responsibility in terms of controls. For implementation, clients need to have knowledge of the “Infrastructure as a Code” concept. Regular implementation of compliance requirements in public clouds may not work out properly due to the agility or velocity of the cloud or due to the peculiarities of the change control mechanisms. Due to the vast experience of Digital Edge with organizations such as HITRUST, Digital Edge can assist in the automatization of a large portion of the compliance responsibilities in the public cloud and, at the same time, help establish compliance policies and provide favorable conditions for present and future deployments.

Zero Trust Deployments

Zero Trust’ is a widespread and favored concept among many clients and security vendors. Digital Edge seeks ways to adopt the Zero Trust philosophy and architecture for our customers because Zero Trust not only suggests a higher level of security control but also limits the range of exposure for security breaches, speeding up the incident response time. Moreover, Zero Trust simplifies compliance and audibility.

Virtual Company Architectures

‘Tele-working,’ ‘remote working,’ and ‘virtual offices’ are getting more widespread nowadays, but they require special considerations for cybersecurity and privacy compliance, creating more risks for the company. The Technology Team of Digital Edge will be able to recommend a range of HITRUST compliant solutions in terms of:

  • Endpoint protection 
  • Mobile device management 
  • Data loss prevention and protection 
  • Onboarding and termination of remote employees 
  • Identity management, amongst others.

GRC Software

Digital Edge has created, supports, and constantly improves its proprietary Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) software. The GRC platform, CyberRegulator, is a single compliance platform created to automate numerous tasks within the preparation framework for the HITRUST certification and re-certification. Due to its automatization options, this platform allows decreasing the time, effort, and cost of certification. All compliance customers of Digital Edge are granted a free license.

The Price

The pricing of the services by Digital Edge is strictly and transparently aligned with the cost of the audit. Just as compliance organizations size their audits in a standardized way, Digital Edge follows the same approach and prices its service to be equal to the price of an audit.

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