For any business to survive and thrive, it must do everything within its power to gain and maintain its clients trust. This may seem obvious, and perhaps it is, but the fact of the matter is that many companies do not demonstrate any good reason why consumers should grant their trust to these organizations. Trust must be earned, and it must be demonstrable.
We at NetGain Technologies are fully committed to the idea of trust, and we’ve recently taken additional steps to put these beliefs into action.
The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (“AICPA”) issued new guidance related to the structure, requirements and methods of reporting on controls at a service organization. This need was fueled, in part, by the increasing use of hosted services, software as a service (“SAAS”) solutions, managed security, enterprise I.T. outsourcing and cloud computing, (which provides user entities with on-demand network access to a shared pool of computing resources, such as networks, servers, storage, applications and services), among others.
When the new standards for SOC 2 were first announced, we decided to perform a thorough self-assessment before undergoing the independent examination. We wanted to make sure that we had developed optimized reporting mechanisms and to guarantee that we were following best practices. Once this was done, we gladly applied for and received SOC 2 Type 1 certification. SOC 2 verifies that we have met strict standards when it comes to security, availability of data, processing integrity and confidentiality. Our actions were entirely motivated by a desire to continue providing best-in-class service. I’m happy to say that we achieved this goal.
I want to reiterate that we did not pursue these practices simply and solely to meet SOC standards. Far from it. Our goal as a company has always been to provide the highest-quality services to our clients in every applicable area. This includes not just our I.T. services, but also how we handle customer information internally. I think it is fair to say that we hold ourselves to even higher standards than those mandated by the SOC certification programs. But I also believe it is important that we pursue initiatives which can demonstrate our commitment to excellence to our customers. Only by doing so can we continue to earn and hold our clients’ trust.
