UKFast has achieved the management standard ISO 22301 for business continuity and ISO 27018, the code of best practice for protecting personally identifiable information in the cloud.
ISO 22301 shows the company is equipped to maintain operations during a number of disaster scenarios. The standard requires UKFast to undertake regular testing to prove that resilience and redundancy plans are efficient and provide high-level safeguards for business continuity in the event of an incident. Networks, infrastructure and communication are all tested as part of the standard, as well as time scales for recovery.
The ISO 27018 complements many of the data processing responsibilities set out by the incoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in its aims to protect personal data.
The standard ensures UKFast is able to manage any client data requests within the time frame required by GDPR and is able to fulfil data subjects' rights – like the right to be informed, right of access and the right to erasure – on behalf of its clients.
Lawrence Jones, UKFast CEO said, "a huge part of our business is ensuring clients stay online and keep running at top speed. Connectivity is mission-critical for our clients so it's a massive responsibility and one that we take incredibly seriously.
"Testing allows us to gather accurate data on the length of time it takes to recover from a given scenario so we can communicate time frames to our clients. We're working hard to further improve the efficiency of our response in the event of a disaster incident.
"It's an additional level of reassurance for clients and it gives them more clarity about the redundancy and response testing we're doing across a number of scenarios, whether that's from an outage in one of our data centres or a loss of connectivity at one of our office buildings.
"As GDPR comes into force we're doing everything we can to support our clients in their journey to compliance. Achieving this ISO standard assures our clients that we are following the best standards of data protection practice and we are continuing to push boundaries and improve our processes."