Welocalize Leads the Industry with ISO Certification for Virtual Locations, Setting New Standards for Quality and Information Security

NEW YORK —

In a virtual work environment, how are data security, quality processes, and compliance affected? How can global organizations implement quality management in a cloud-based ecosystem? These questions are increasingly becoming a focus of industry attention.

A new ISO virtual location certification model is now feasible, providing authoritative verification for organizations whose core business functions do not rely on physical locations, confirming that their quality processes can be effectively executed and followed in a virtual environment.

Welocalize, a global leader in the language services industry, has held ISO 9001 certification for 14 consecutive years. Recently, the company became one of the first to obtain virtual location certification for ISO 9001 and ISO 13485, two of the five ISO frameworks it needed to recertify this year.

"The virtual location model certifies cloud-based quality processes and systems, rather than physical buildings and locations as in the past. This provides clients with an added layer of assurance: regardless of where project team members are located, the quality processes, procedures, and systems required to serve them are in place and can be effectively executed," said Silvie Peric, Director of Quality Systems and Strategy at Welocalize.

"We are extremely proud to be among the first companies in the language services industry to obtain virtual location certification. This certification is significant for clients because they can be confident that existing systems are designed to protect their data in a cloud-based work environment. Additionally, this model reduces our audit frequency and cost to once per year, rather than requiring multiple separate audits for each physical location as was the case before earlier this year," Ms. Peric added.

The Path to Virtual Location Certification

Before the pandemic drove the adoption of remote work, Welocalize had already shifted its focus from migrating from physical location-based IT servers to virtualized and protected work environments. This included implementing Okta single sign-on (SSO) functionalityto enable secure and seamless user access to protected data.

"These efforts were carried out in parallel with our ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certification. ISO/IEC 27001 covers the full scope of information security, providing guidance for systematically ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive company and client information. All these steps paved the way for creating secure, quality-driven processes and procedures for a virtual work environment," added Aaron Heber, Vice President of Global IT at Welocalize.

A Strong Portfolio of Certifications

Welocalize holds five ISO certifications, a quality portfolio that, according to Slator, only 2.14% of language service providers (LSPs) possess. In addition to ISO 9001, the company also holds ISO/IEC 27001:2013 (Information Security Management Systems), ISO 17100:2015 (Translation Services), ISO 13485:2016 (Medical Devices), and ISO 18587 (Post-editing of Machine Translation Output) certifications.

To learn more about Welocalize's quality certifications, or to learn about its experience in providing multilingual content translation and localization services globally, please visit welocalize.com。