Why OSPAR?
Financial institutions rely heavily on outsourced service providers (OSPs) to assist with key business objectives.
As financial institutions are ultimately responsible for the service provided to their customers, OSPs must comply with the standards and controls accepted within the financial industry.
The Association of Banks in Singapore has established the Guidelines on Control Objectives and Procedures for all OSPs desiring to work with the numerous financial institutions in Singapore. To demonstrate your organization’s ability to meet these guidelines, an Outsourced Service Provider Audit Report (OSPAR) attestation is mandatory. Without an OSPAR attestation, your organization will not be able to provide services to the rapidly growing number of financial institutions in Singapore.
Digital Edge will ensure that your organization will receive an OSPAR attestation as proof that it has implemented adequate cybersecurity safeguards to maintain the governance and consistency required. With OSPAR, your company will be ready to conduct business, and guarantee the security of your client’s critical information.
Why Digital Edge?
Digital Edge believes in the principle that cybersecurity can be converted into a competitive edge for our clients. We play a principal consulting role in the OSPAR attestation process for our clients.
Digital Edge provides cybersecurity and compliance services to clients in highly regulated industries, and can guarantee that you will receive the OSPAR attestation after we guide your organization through the following process:
Each step in this process is critical, and Digital Edge will steadfastly lead the process smoothly and efficiently until you achieve successful certification.
Digital Edge also guarantees the shortest and least expensive path to your certificaiton.
However, most importanty, our OSPAR implementation on your behalf, will be:
- Unintrusive with ongoing business operations.
- Easily re-certifiable.
- Advantageous to future business processes and organizational growth.
Multi-Certification Requirements
Some organizations are required to be certified by mulitple frameworks in numerous jusrisdictions. This makes meeting compliance standards a much more challenging task.
Fortunately, Digital Edge is an acknowledged expert in all types of compliance regimes, be they in the U.S.A., Europe or Asia. Therefore, whether your organization has to adhere to one standard or many, Digital Edge as a single vendor will provide you with the needed expertise in every jurisdiction.
By using a single GRC platform, Digital Edge is an expert in assisting with risk mapping and controls in multiple frameworks. This proven ability significantly reduces the efforts demanded within the certification process.
The Process
Auditor Selection
All auditors are different, and selecting the proper auditor for the size of your organization, type of business, its internal processes and workforce location is critical.
The OSPAR certification is a 3 year process and 2 phase certification enagagment from the auditor’s perspective. Therefore, the proper selection of auditors vastly contributes to the efficacy of the certification effort and translates into cost savings.
Scoping
The ‘Scope of Certification’ significantly affects the process and price of the certification. Besides cybersecurity aspects, the OSPAR attestation is a proven marketing tool that shows your clients the maturity of your organization. Correct ‘scoping’ wil not only reduce the time and the costs of certification, but will positively impact your ability to sell to larger clients.
Risk Assessment, Gap Analysis.
The ‘Risk Assessment’ plays a crucial role in determining if your business has implemented adequate cybersecurity safeguards.
Determining your ‘Cybersecurity Risk’ is the foundation of developing an effective cybersecurity program. Assessing these risks both defines and informs the necessary controls, and the levels to which solutions are to be implemented.
The ‘Gap Analysis’ allows for precise planning and informs the timing of the project’s duration and required audit scheduling.
Implementation
Digital Edge’s proven ability to oversee the full scope and details of the certification process, gives our clients a clear and precise vision of the project’s duration.
Giving Digital Edge responsibility for control implementations, policy writing, reviews, records, and internal audits provides you with one comprehensive price for our services.
However, even if Digital Edge is contracted to be responsible for only a partial part of the process, we will make sure that the implemented management system is both auditable and certifiable.
Digital Edge not only prepares the technology, but the documentation required, the processes, and your staff to further empower your organization’s abilities.
Certification
Digital Edge will be with you during both phases of the certification.
We have vast experience in how to prepare your staff for the audit.
We know exactly what auditors want. Digital Edge knows all the questions and correct answers that auditors will be asking and looking for to grant certification.
We will stand with you and we take upon ourselves the responsibility for your certification.
That is our commitment.
The Team
Project Management
Digital Edge dedicates an executive project management oversight team for each certification project.
Practice Manager
Each project is allocated a “Practice Manager” – a proven professional with a legal and cybersecurity background who is accredited with multiple successful certifications. He/she will be responsible for engaging: the “Technology Team” for technological implemenations, “Policy Writers” to provide documentation, and “Auditors” to provide internal audits and reviews.
Technology Team
Digital Edge will provide a full stack Technology Team for the implementation phase of the project. Our Technolgy Team is intimately familiar with such concepts such as control maturity, traceability and auditability.
Our knowledge is quite vast in all cybersecurity products and technologies popular in SMB markets, and Digital Edge is partnered with cybersecurity software and hardware vendors that can help ease implementations and costs
We guarantee proper implementations not only from a technological point of view, but also from the standpoint of our ability to collect and preserve artifacts, undergo monitoring, and show maturation to the required level of perfomance.
Policy Writer
Policy writing is a highly developed and sought after skill in this industry sector. We have access to such experts.
All our policies comply to the most advanced standards and are in accord and compliant with HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley laws.
Auditors
Our auditors are certified by the same certifying bodies as the OSPAR auditors who will be responsible for your certification. They have the same skills and experience.
During the internal audits provided by Digital Edge auditors, you will experience the same rigor of an OSPAR audit.
Digital Edge is proud to say that the internal audits we provide for clients play a significant role in the training of staff for the real OSPAR audit.
The Technology
Digital Edge has vast experience with most popular technologies, cybersecurity software and hardware, as well as the techniques and solutions available on the market today. The following are some highlights of our implementations:
Public Cloud Deployments
Our Compliance and Technology team has great experience with multiple ‘Public Cloud” platforms. We are advanced partners with Azure, and maintain special ‘Cybersecurity’ and ‘Well Architected Framework’ competencies with AWS.
To be secure in public clouds takes lots of responsibility in terms of controls and efficient implemenations. It requires clients to have a deep knowledge of the “Infrastructure as a Code” concept.
Thus, traditional implementation of compliance requirements in public clouds may not always work or be properly maintained because of the agility and velocity of the cloud, or because of change control mechanisms. Due to Digital Edge’s work with multiple organizations such as ISO and CIS on the ‘Compliance as a Code’ concept, Digital Edge has helped numerous organizations to automate a large portion of their compliance resonsibilities in the public cloud, while at the same time estabilish compliance policies and guardrails for present and future deployments.
Zero Trust Deployments
‘Zero Trust’ has become a popular concept that is being adopted by many clients and security vendors. The Digital Edge team will consider every opportunity to implement the Zero Trust philosophy and architecture as a solution for its client’s infrastructures.
Why? Because Zero Trust not only assures tighter security controls, it limits the potential “radius of exposure” during security breaches and speeds up incident response time.
It also allows for easier compliance and auditability.
Virtual Company Architectures
‘Teleworking,’ and ‘virtual offices’ are popular concepts, however they require special considerations for cybersecurity and privacy compliance.
Depending on the scope of work and risks assesements, our Technology Team may recommend a variety of OSPAR compliant solutions including:
- Endpoint protection
- Mobile device management (MDM)
- Data loss prevention and protection (DLP)
- Onboarding and termination of remote employees
- Identity management, and others.
GRC Software
Digital Edge created, supports, and constantly improves its proprietary Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) software. Our GRC platform, CyberRegulator, is a single compliance platform which automates many tasks related to the OSPAR certification and re-certification processes. It also shortens preparation time, thus lowering total costs of the effort.
Digital Edge provides a free license for all of its compliance clients.
The Price
Digital Edge aligns the pricing of its services with the cost of the audit. Just as compliance organizations have a standardized way of sizing their audits, Digital Edge follows the same guidance, and prices its service to be equal to the price of an audit.