Leveraging Information Security as a Competitive Advantage

by Sarah Harvey / July 11th, 2019

When organizations come to us to pursue their information security goals, we make sure they know all the benefits of compliance accomplishments. This ranges from avoiding fines and answering to regulatory bodies to protecting and strengthening your business. What we want more organizations to take advantage of, though, is leveraging information security as a competitive advantage. How do you do that?

How Can You Use Information Security as a Competitive Advantage?

Information security efforts do more than assure your clients that their sensitive data is protected. When you partner with an audit or penetration testing firm that educates you and performs quality-driven assessments, your sales and marketing teams will learn how powerful compliance can be.

There are several marketing benefits to achieving compliance. It gives you an opportunity to display and explain the value of your compliance accomplishments, establishes your brand as one that’s committed to privacy and security, and gives you a competitive edge. There are so many possible ways to use compliance for marketing and branding tools. Is your organization using information security as a competitive advantage in these ways?

Marketing your product as reliable and secure, with an audit report to show for it.
Adding a landing page to your website that outlines all of your compliance achievements and goals.
Incorporating a compliance logo into company email signatures.
Using compliance logos on your company’s branded presentation templates.
Producing materials for conferences that highlight your information security program.
Distributing a press release announcing each audit report that you receive.
Publishing a blog post or a series of blog posts that outlines your compliance journey, like our client Paubox recently did with their HITRUST journey.

Educating Your Sales and Marketing Teams on Information Security as a Competitive Advantage

Does your competition have the same audit report that you do? Do they have the same information security standards that you do? Do they undergo penetration testing? If not, you’re ahead of the game. Your competitors are very likely considering how to accomplish challenging compliance expectations, and when you’re proactive about establishing an information security program, it will pay off. You can close deals that rely on SOC 2 attestations, you can go after business that requires GDPR compliance, you can expand your services to the healthcare industry through HIPAA compliance; the opportunities are endless when you can demonstrate that you care about your customers’ data and have the evidence to prove it.

Leveraging information security as a competitive advantage does require some extra work, though. Does your sales and marketing team understand or even know about all the effort that went into an audit? You need to take steps to educate your sales and marketing team on what types of audits you’ve been through so that they can explain the value of your information security program to prospects. When your team can have sales conversations that relay why your service is more secure than a competitor’s, you are fully utilizing all the work that went into your compliance accomplishments.

After going through a SOC 2 Type II audit at KirkpatrickPrice, Unqork’s CISO told us, “We want to be able to tell our clients and our clients’ customers that the framework that we’ve built and the design or architecture that we’ve built is as secure as is available on the market because that builds a lot of confidence and meets industry requirements. We knew that the sooner we could close that gap and prove to our customers and prospects that we’ve rolled out an information security program, thought about the processes and procedures, and considered privacy laws and requirements around the globe, that opens the door to more conversations and builds confidence in Unqork as a vendor.”

How KirkpatrickPrice Helps

We always recommend that our clients leverage information security as a competitive advantage and strive to help find creative ways to do so. When clients complete an audit with us, we’re dedicated to helping them find the best way to market their compliance. We offer our clients a complimentary press kit that includes compliance logos, the writing and distribution of a press release announcing their recent compliance accomplishment, copy to use in various marketing materials, and advice on how to best market their focus on information security. Want to learn more about how to leverage your compliance accomplishments as a competitive advantage? Contact us today.