Shared Services Centers - Define reasonable guarantees of compliance, confidentiality and availabili

27 October 2010:

Setting up a Shared Services Center means rethinking the ways individuals exchange information. These flows of information must be made secure so that the service expected by users is reliable. This involves not only strengthening the mechanisms that guarantee confidentiality to access data, but also ensuring overall standardization in all the countries concerned - and that makes for greater complexity.

Generally speaking, the security and control systems needed for a center to function smoothly must be studied well in advance. A dedicated project manager must be involved right from the outset, tasked with examining all the security aspects of the SSC: compliance with statutory requirements, physical and logical security of IT systems and data, and alignment of core business processes.

Security managers know that there is no such thing as zero risk. The aim is therefore to strike the right balance while taking into account economic factors, so that SSC clients’ requirements in terms of compliance and confidentiality can be reasonably fulfilled.