WHAT IS IASME?
IASME is abbreviated for Information Assurance for Small and Medium Enterprise. It is a cybersecurity standard which is a government-funded project created to help reach a cybersecurity standard. It is an affordable and achievable alternative to the international standard, ISO27001.
It helps small companies in the supply chain industry to assess and validate their level of cybersecurity for a reasonable cost and specifies that they are taking adequate measures to protect their business and customers information properly.
IASME AND ISO27001
The IASME standard is designed to fall along the same lines as the ISO27001, but it is specifically made for small companies with a low budget. The gold standard of IASME demonstrates baseline compliance with the international standard.
The Information Assurance for Small & Medium Enterprise (IASME) standard was established over several years during a government-funded project to create an attainable cyber security standard for small companies. The international standard, ISO27001, is wide-ranging but enormously challenging for a small company to achieve and maintain.
IASME AND CE (CYBER ESSENTIALS)
Cyber Essentials is a similar practice like IASME, and it is not only for SMEs but businesses of all sizes, if done correctly, it detects the issues in the current security posture of the company and validate if all the required and recommended measures are taken to safeguard the business from any cyber-attack.
Though, only having Cyber Essentials in place doesn’t prove much, applying both Cyber Essentials with IASME Governance further helps your business to identify all key areas of operation. From certifying your backups are working to identifying risk areas of operation, to ensuring your entire supply chain is checked and secure. CE and IASME together help your business reach the level of ISO27001.
If you are a business and you are looking to ensure that you are doing things right, would like to implement the best practices of ISO 27001, but can’t afford to go for ISO27001, the IASME governance standard is the one for you.
Having both Cyber Essentials and IASME Governance also certifies that you are taking the essential measures to improve your cybersecurity as well as working to protect your data governance and personal information, which can help businesses win bids.
WHY DOES IASME DO FOR YOUR BUSINESS?
The IASME Governance Standard helps the businesses to achieve the following:
• Detect the potential risks to their information.
• Take appropriate measures to control the risks and secure their business from cyber-attack.
• Keep information risk at an acceptable level.
• Evaluate their practices with a structured self-assessment of the comprehensiveness of their information and security measures.
• Validate that the security controls that you implement provide the ideal level of information and cyber security.
• Be independently audited by an assessor who will detect and analyse business risks and verify the effectiveness of what they are doing.
• Alert the authorities of any information risks in businesses and the more extensive supply chain of which they may be unaware of.
• Work to a standard of information security within a supply chain regardless of size.
• Give themselves, customers, and their supply chain, a level of assurance parallel to ISO/IEC 27001 and similar standards.