Client Requirement and Business Drivers
As a consequence of the Gershon review findings the Whitehall department implemented a Shared Services Centre in order to reduce operational costs across the department and its agencies.
In order to derive these planned benefits from the Shared Services Centre the agency needed to be able to connect to it. This required the agency to become Accredited to demonstrate appropriate information security management in order to facilitate this connection.
The client therefore decided that it was essential to engage with an independent, expert CLAS consultancy provider to analyse the requirements to attain accreditation and assist in delivering the requirements.
Recognising the importance of the right specialist expertise, together with the need for objectivity and independence Commissum was engaged to meet the strategic, business and technical security related objectives of the project within tight timescales set by the business.
The business drivers for this engagement can be summarised as follows:
- Cost reduction targets as part of Whitehall wide shared services initiative
- Secondary benefits for agency in terms of managing their operational risk by improving their organisation’s information security to recognised government accreditation standards
- The client recognised the potentially disastrous impact on operations that could arise from any security related incident