With cyber attacks on the rise and 'Work From Home' (WFH) continuing to be the norm, we caught up with Nicholas Fripp from iCognition to discuss how businesses and industries can best protect their data and information, while allowing the flexibility of a WFH model to their employees.
iCognition was founded in 2003 in Canberra and is an SME specialising in information management consulting and system implementations. Today, iCognition have offices in Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide, and assist a growing base of Federal, State/Territory and Local Government agencies with their IMG implementations. Our clients are also in the regulated industry sector, including financial services, universities, and not-for-profit organisations.
iCognition are a platinum CyberRes and Information Management implementation partner with MicroFocus.
What services does iCognition offer to clients and how does this benefit the organisations:
As well as offering information management and governance consulting and system implementation services, iCognition also assist organisations with strategic advisory services to help our clients become more cyber resilient by identifying and managing security and privacy risks in client content.
Importantly, we believe that to recommend best practice we need to be practitioners ourselves, helping clients implement content management solutions, integrate them to their corporate applications, and get the best return on their investment. This includes providing our own cloud hosted EDRMS which is security certified to Australian Government standards.
Have you noticed a change in document and records management since the WFH method has been more widely adapted?
The increase in customers working from home has changed the way people access systems, the security required to manage information and records in those systems, and ensuring access is always available from any device at any time. Our cloud strategy has seen this change become easier for many customers, providing them quick and easy access to their information and records from anywhere at any time.
Working from home has increased the use of Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and other Microsoft platforms, so this had led to iCognition developing strategies to allow our customers to work from Microsoft 365 and have records management to happen automatically behind the scenes without the user being involved. Generally, we see a bigger requirement and desire for organisations to allow records management by stealth through integrating systems, streamlining how organisations handle document and records management.
What are the key challenges/concerns surrounding document and record management as we enter the WFH era?
Information is everywhere, and businesses and governments are facing the dual challenges of accessing the right information and records quickly and securely, while making sure they meet compliance and regulatory requirements.
The biggest challenge is organisations and individuals wanting to pick and choose which application suits them best, whether working from home or at the office, including working from the devices they need. Key to this is ensuring staff have access to the right information at the right time, as well as seamless records management that happens behind the scenes, and of course ensuring the security of you information to ensure safe and secure transactions.
How does iCognition’s services assist in protecting client’s data and security:
Given that we are field practitioners, we implement solutions and then advise our customers on practical and useful best practices. We take what we’ve learned and apply them to our customers strategies to help them deliver the right information to the right person at the right time, while also ensuring compliance and regulations are met.
In our practice, we always take things to the highest level we can. For example, our cloud hosted Electronic Document and Records Management software as a service (EDRMSaaS) provides customers with the highest level of security and protection. This offering is a scalable, fully managed and secure cloud service that ensures compliance obligations, delivers enterprise content efficiently, and maximises the power of information assets. EDRMSaaS has achieved IRAP assessment up to Protected classification and is also ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certified to securely manage all your vital information
Why is this so important?
With cyber attacks more and more present each day, it is vitally important for an organisation’s corporate memory to be highly secured and protected from unauthorised access. Our customers rely on our highly protected environment to reduce the risk and avoid the complexities of them having to store and manage this critical business information
We are in the age of information overload, do you have any advice or top tips on how organisations can best manage their information?
Information is a vital corporate asset. It needs to be identified, managed, and controlled for your organisation to maximise its value. Ensure your organisation has a well-defined and communicated policy and guideline on how to store and work on critical business information, and that your systems are integrated to share and control vital records, including making sure that are highly secure and protected from unauthorised access.
Look to streamline how your staff work and collaborate by implementing solutions that minimise the number of times required to interact with information, and when they do interact with it, it is efficient. This may include implementing automated workflow solutions which define exact business requirements and sign-off points for documents, or collaboration tools for sharing information from a source or truth instead of working on your own “working copy”.
