What is the impact on data security, quality processes, and compliance in virtual work environments? How are global organizations approaching quality management in a cloud-based ecosystem?  

Now possible, the new ISO virtual-site certification model provides validation that organizations—where the central business functions are not tied to physical locations—are adhering to and executing quality processes virtually. 

Welocalize, a leader in the global language services industry and ISO 9001 certified for 14 years, recently achieved its first virtual-site certification for ISO 9001 and ISO 13485, two of its five ISO frameworks due for recertification this year.  

“The virtual-site model certifies cloud-based quality processes and systems; not physical buildings and locations as was done in the past. It is an added assurance for our clients that our quality processes, procedures, and systems required for their service request are in place and can be executed effectively no matter where the project team member resides,” comments Silvie Peric, Director of Quality Systems & Strategy, Welocalize.

“We take immense pride in being one of the first companies in the language services industry to achieve virtual-site certifications. The certification is important for our clients because they can have confidence that the systems in place are designed to help protect their data in a cloud-based work environment. In addition, this model reduces our audit frequency and cost to once per year, instead of numerous individual audits that were required per physical location until earlier this year,” adds Ms. Peric. 

The Path to Virtual-Site Accreditation 

Prior to the shift to remote worksites brought on by the pandemic, Welocalize put a priority on migrating from physical location-based IT servers to a virtually enabled and protected work environment. This included implementing Okta Single Sign-On (SSO) functionality to facilitate seamless secure user access to protected data.

“These efforts were rolled out in parallel to our ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certification. ISO/IEC 27001 covers the entire scope of information security and provides guidance on a systematic approach to ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive company and customer information. All of these steps helped pave the way to creating processes and procedures for a secure, quality-driven virtual work environment,” adds Aaron Heber, Vice President of Global IT at Welocalize.

Robust Portfolio of Certifications

Welocalize holds five ISO certifications, a quality portfolio found at only 2.14% of LSPs, according to Slator. In addition to ISO 9001, the company has ISO/IEC 27001:2013 (Information Security Management Systems), ISO 17100:2015 (Translation Services), ISO 13485:2016 (Medical Devices), and ISO 18587 (Human Post-Edited Machine Translation Services) certifications.

For more information about Welocalize’s quality certifications or to learn about its experience translating and localizing multilingual content, from anywhere in the world, visit welocalize.com.