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Audit Services

Better manage your processes, people, security risks and compliance

For any organization, ensuring the security of their assets and infrastructure that contains data about the business, their people and clients is critical.

As business evolves, processes become inefficient and no longer meet the purpose of their design and stated expectations.
An audit of business processes helps the organization to identify these gaps and take corrective measures to increase their efficiency.

Productivity and Efficiency Analysis

Our business process audits focus on measuring the productivity of current processes used to produce different goods and services.
We assess the extent to which the business processes result in larger gains or profits compared to the costs and investment in maintaining those processes.

Process Mapping: We develop business process maps to help managers understand how the processes can be improved and where they overlap across the organization.

Technology Adoption Consultation: We advise our clients on technology adoption options in making their business processes more efficient, by reducing their costs, resource consumption, and time to execute different work activities.

A Human Resources (HR) audit involves an assessment of the skills within the organization and their organization structure.

After conducting a detailed personnel audit, the senior management can answer questions about distributing work more equally throughout the employees, identifying the most competent employees for key positions, and managing employee productivity more effectively.

Process Assessment: Our audit covers assessment of the systems and processes used by the HR department, especially for recruiting, and training and developing the workforce.

Staffing Needs: Our audit includes an assessment of staffing levels, that forms the basis for workforce planning.

Skill Assessment: We conduct a comprehensive analysis of the skills and competencies present in the organization in, and analyze if these are sufficient to meet the needs of the organization.

Decision Rights | Distribution of Responsibility and Authority: We advise clients about the more efficient distribution of decision-making responsibility and hand-offs.

A Competency-Based Approach

Our approach to people audit employs a competency model, where we focus on the availability of competencies within the workforce what can help deliver better business outcomes and achieve the goals of the organization.

Performance Audit: supports the ongoing efforts of the human resource department to identify various performance issues.

Implementation Support: We help our clients implement our recommendations by proposing the necessary changes within the current organizational structure and systems.

Job Creation and Design: We help our clients in the creation of new jobs and positions within the organization as well as revising current job profiles and descriptions.

A software audit helps you make assessments on the validity and authenticity of the software used and that by using it you are not exposing your information and IT assets to security risks and cyberthreats. License Verification and Authenticity: We inform our clients about any potential legal issues that may arise from their current practices with regard to the use of the software, and propose steps to increase compliance.

Quality Assurance & Cost Management

We also help clients determine whether the software used for a certain work activitye is of the best quality, and we offer suggestions for alternative applications that can serve better. We help clients streamline the costs of acquiring software licenses and maintaining business continuity.

We identify areas where the organization needs to improve in order to meet the expectations of their own clients.

This involves an assessment of their manufacturing and service delivery operations as well as the supply chains that link the organization to suppliers and other outside partners are sufficiently integrated.

Compliance Assessment: We also conduct a compliance assessment to see if your organization’s systems comply with the applicable industry standards for quality, health, safety and environmental protection.

Vendor Management Consultation: We offer consultation to help evaluate alternatives for their supply chain partners in order to increase the value added by their supply chains and sourcing strategies.

Our reports inform clients about opportunity areas where they can create synergies within the company through better operational management.

Our services help identify gaps and security risks and take steps to minimize any potential adverse effects and threats.

  • Single sign-on and digital identity

  • Application and infrastructure security assessment

  • Enterprise application and API security

  • Data security & privacy

An information security audit involves the assessment of IT systems to ensure whether they offer adequate protection for the informational assets of the organization.

Assessment of Current Practices: We define information security benchmarks depending on the nature of their operations and their industry, and we assess the current practices and advise on the weaknesses.

Risks Mitigation: We identify and prioritize all the possible risks to the information assets, including the risk of malware, fishing, and corporate spying.

We recommend practical steps to mitigate the risks. We help to identify vulnerabilities and gaps in the systems that can create potential problems for our clients.

Audit of Control Systems: We identify whether the controls in place are adequate against security risks and threats.

ERP Audit: We monitor security systems to assess their impact on the overall ERP applications.

Business Continuity: We design our recommendations with a focus on maintaining the business continuity.

Support with Implementation: We offer ongoing support in implementing our recommendations and monitoring as to improve their information security systems on a regular basis.

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Cyber Security Audit

Advisory and Training
Proactively manage and reduce cyber risks

It is critical to protect key information assets and sensitive data, to ensure sustainability of your business.

Cyber Security is a strategic risk management issue, that encompasses people, processes, technology, data, internal policies and is interdependent with exterior pressures such as regulations, data protection, and shareholders’ value protection.

We can assist with a risk assessment to identify vulnerabilities, and help develop an adequate information security policy, systems and processes, as to protect your company from Cyber threats, develop defence mechanisms and implement these effectively at every level, organize Cyber security trainings to increase awareness, and best practices, and check that your company is ready to comply with the new regulations, such as EU GDPR.

Digital Forensic Investigations & Analysis

In the unfortunate event your organization’s hardware, software or data becomes compromised, unlawfully breached, lost or stolen, we can conduct a comprehensive digital forensic investigation, and prepare, an Evidential Pack and Expert Report, to enable you take legal action against perpetrators.

Data Recovery

We offer Data Recovery solutions from electronic devices, hard drives, storage or back up devices, RAID or servers, on a No Data recovered – No Fee basis.
The amount of retrievable data depends on the causes of data loss and severity of the damage.

Cyber and Data Insurance

TO MINIMIZE LOSSES FROM LOSS, THEFT OR DAMAGE CAUSED TO CRITICAL ASSETS AND DATA
You may need cyber and data risks insurance if you:

  • hold sensitive data, which if lost, damaged or stolen can disrupt your business, harm your reputation or expose you to regulatory fines and/or legal claims

  • have a payment card industry (PCI) merchant services agreement

We are not an insurance company or brokers, but we can refer you to specialized insurance companies, who could assist you in subscribing a Cyber Insurance and Data Risk policy. We can assist in assessing the merits of each policy, in terms of their suitability for your cyber security needs and their level of protection in terms of covering your critical assets in case of a cyber incident.

Furthermore, we can assist you from a public relation perspective to communicate about the data breach inside and outside your organization and with the regulator as well.

Digital Reputation Management

Enhance your online image

Simply removing a negative content is not a sufficient or effective measure. If a negative comment is simply removed, it may shortly reappear on the Web.
We can help you manage your digital reputation in a proactive and effective way:

  • mitigation of negative & defamatory publicity

  • shaping public perception of your image to restore unfairly tainted online reputation

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Risk Assessment

Compliance and Regulation Audit Services

We help companies meet the increasingly stringent information governance and industry regulatory compliance requirements.

We perform a comparative IT risk assessment to evaluate security risks as well as compliance with applicable laws and regulations.

We can assist you in smooth implementation of compliance with the EU Data Protection Directive across your organization, without disrupting your daily business activities.

GDPR Compliance

In the unfortunate event your organization’s hardware, software or data becomes compromised, unlawfully breached, lost or stolen, we can conduct a comprehensive digital forensic investigation, and prepare, an Evidential Pack and Expert Report, to enable you take legal action against perpetrators.

The GDPR is the new General Data Protection Regulation designed to:

  • Strengthen individuals’ rights over their personal data

  • Increase sanctions for personal data misuse

If you run a business of any kind, anywhere in the world, and you deal with EU citizens’ personal data, the new rules apply to you.
Individuals have rights concerning their data:

  • To access their own personal data

  • To have inaccuracies corrected

  • To have information erased under the ‘right to be forgotten’

  • To prevent direct marketing, automated decision-making and profiling

  • To let people transfer their data from one controller to another

Your IT systems need to support all of this.

Almost every business collects, keeps and uses personal data from prospects, customers or both. GDPR compliance means that you have to abide by strict protocols for:

  • Collecting personal data, both B2C and B2B

  • Storing personal data

  • Using personal data

Non-compliance can mean being fined by the authorities or sued by individual consumers. The financial penalties for non-compliance are bigger than for the old Data Protection Act. There’s an upper limit of €20 million or 4% of your annual global turnover, whichever is highest. The authorities can also:

  • Demand audits

  • Request things are fixed by a strict deadline

  • Force you to destroy illegal data

  • Stop you communicating with your databases

  • Stop data transfers to other countries

The EU GDPR aim is to protect citizens’ personal data, increase responsibility and accountability of organizations processing personal data, and simplify the regulatory environment for business. The EU GDPR ensures full harmonization of data protection law across the EU internal market.

The complexity of the EU GDPR landscape, including the use of cloud services, requires organizations to actively take measures to protect their personal data. Because of this complexity and the large amount of data processed, legal arrangements like policies, contracts or protocols are not sufficient to comply with the EU GDPR. Companies must take organizational and technical measures, beyond traditional security measures that are aimed at confidentiality, integrity and availability of the data, in order to ensure compliance with EU GDPR.

Potential regulatory fines: Infringements of the provisions shall be subject to administrative fines up to €20 million, or in the case of an undertaking, up to 4 % of the total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher (Art 83 of the REGULATION (EU) 2016/679 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT).

Average cost of a security breach: 90% of large organizations experience a security breach of some sort. £1.5m - £3.5m is the average cost to a large organization and £75k - £350k is the average cost to a small business.

Compliance and Regulation

The new REGULATION (EU) 2016/679 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 27 April 2016, repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation), and coming into effect on 25 MAY 2018, every personal data controlling organization becomes concerned, in terms of protection and processing of their data (*).

New Rules will have to be complied with whether your organization processes any employees’, clients’ or other personal data. Infringements of the Regulation’s provisions shall, be subject to administrative fines up to €20 million, or in the case of an undertaking, up to 4 % of the total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher.

In accordance with the new Regulation, protection of natural persons should be technologically neutral and should not depend on the techniques used. It should apply to the processing of personal data by automated means, as well as to manual processing, if the personal data are contained or are intended to be contained in a filing system (§15)

*To take account of the specific situation of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, this Regulation includes a derogation for organizations with fewer than 250 employees with regard to record-keeping.

ADOPT BEST PRACTICE

It’s important to make sure your IT systems comply with the new regulations around personal data.

You also have to be able to show exactly how you comply with GDPR, documenting every decision taken about a processing activity.

  • You abide by GDPR if you are any company that collects and/or processes EU citizen’s personal data

  • You have collected consent to store and use a person’s data and explained how it would be used

  • You have set a suitable protocol in place to deal with notifying the supervisory authority within 72 hours of discovering a security breach unless doing so results in risks to the rights and freedom of individuals

  • You must be able to provide electronic copies of private records to people who ask for it, detailing what personal data you are processing, where the data is stored and why

  • You must be able to delete people’s personal data as well as stop sharing it with third parties, who must also stop processing it

  • You must let people give their data from one data controller to another, in a commonly used and machine readable format.

  • You must build data security into your processes

  • Data controllers and data processors must appoint a DPO

Unless you have the internal expertise and resources, it might be best to partner, with a specialist to comply with GDPR.

Governance, Risk and Compliance

Enhance your reputation, ensure compliance, and deliver real business value, while complying with regulatory requirements.

  • Minimise risk by identifying and addressing potential risk.

  • Strengthen compliance through regular audit and control monitoring for reducing compliance costs and leakage.

  • Enhance reputation by adhering to compliance requirements.

The Challenge:

Governance, Risk and Compliance processes operate in silos at many companies, creating a multiplicity of frameworks and systems.

This can result in:

  • Ineffective risk minimisation, due to insufficient understanding of financial, operational, IT, regulatory, and fraud risks.

  • Exposure to fines, penalties and litigation.

The Solution:

We help companies comply with regulations by focusing on:

  • IT Risk and Compliance

  • Segregation of Duties

  • Regulatory Compliance

  • Continuous Control Monitoring

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Contract compliance and optimization

Contracts form the basis of an entire business yet they are one of the least protected assets of companies.

For most companies, contracts form the basis of their entire business. However, they are growing more and more complex, and take huge amounts of time, resources and money to create.

In addition, many organizations struggle to develop an effective contract management vision as well as the resources to prevent revenue leakage and cost overrun – all while extracting maximum value from every agreement.

Contract Compliance & Optimization (CCO) is an innovative service that manages your contracts throughout the entire contract lifecycle.