GIS Cloud has been awarded ISO/IEC 27001 certification — the most widely recognized international standard for information security management. For our customers, this is a practical change with concrete benefits: faster procurement, simpler vendor reviews, and audited proof that the location data you trust us with is protected to the highest international standard.
Here’s what it means for you, and what we did to get here.
What ISO 27001 Is — and Why It Matters for Geospatial Data
ISO/IEC 27001 is the leading international standard for Information Security Management Systems (ISMS), published jointly by ISO and IEC. It defines how an organization must identify and assess information security risks, implement controls to mitigate them, and continuously monitor, audit, and improve the way it handles data.
Certification is awarded only after a comprehensive independent audit by an accredited certification body. To maintain it, we go through annual third-party reviews and a full recertification audit every three years. It’s not a one-time achievement — it’s a sustained operating model.
The reason ISO 27001 matters specifically for a geospatial platform is that location data is unusually sensitive. A utility’s asset map shows where every valve, transformer, or buried cable sits. A municipality’s parcel layer reflects ownership and zoning decisions. A field inspection record can include the exact GPS coordinates of damaged infrastructure, hazardous sites, or protected ecological areas. This is the kind of information that needs protection at a different level than ordinary business data — and ISO 27001 gives our customers an internationally audited guarantee that it gets it.
What Changes for You — Concretely
- Procurement gets faster. Security questionnaires and vendor risk assessments are routinely the slowest part of a buying cycle. Instead of your procurement and IT teams spending weeks answering custom questionnaires about us, they can rely on our ISO 27001 certificate as authoritative proof of our security posture. We’re hearing from new customers that this single change can compress evaluation cycles from months into weeks.
- Compliance alignment is stronger. ISO 27001 provides a strong security foundation that overlaps substantially with the requirements of GDPR, SOC 2, HIPAA, and major cybersecurity frameworks like NIST — which makes your own compliance work easier when you operate under any of these. If your organization operates under any of these — and most of our European, UK, and government customers do — working with an ISO 27001-certified vendor materially strengthens your own compliance position.
- Security is continuously audited, not just documented. Many vendors claim “enterprise-grade security.” ISO 27001 means a third party verifies it every year, against a standardized framework, with public consequences if it falls short. That’s a categorically different kind of assurance.
- Nothing changes about how you use the platform. There’s no price increase tied to certification. There’s no migration to do. No new logins. No changes to your existing data, maps, or integrations. The platform you use today is the same one — now with audited proof of how it’s built and operated.
For Government and Public-Sector Buyers
Most municipal and government RFPs in the UK, EU, and increasingly in North America and Australia now require ISO 27001 or an equivalent (SOC 2, NIST). Without one, vendors get eliminated at shortlist — often without ever speaking to the buyer’s team. This has historically been a barrier for smaller GIS vendors and a reason many public-sector organizations defaulted to a small set of legacy providers regardless of fit.
Earlier this year, a UK Combined Authority awarded us a multi-year framework contract with ISO 27001 as a defined requirement. We moved through procurement on the same timeline as the largest incumbents — something that simply wasn’t possible a year ago.
For Utilities, Engineering Firms, and Industrial Operators
For water, electric, telecom, vegetation management, and industrial operations, the concerns differ: asset data is competitively sensitive, field workers sync data from sometimes thousands of points, and internal audit functions scrutinize where data lives and who can touch it. ISO 27001 covers all of this end-to-end — access controls and audit trails, encryption in transit and at rest as field data syncs from mobile devices, supplier security across infrastructure providers, and documented incident response. If you’ve ever filled in a vendor security review for a field tool, this certification answers most of those questions before they’re asked.
What We Strengthened Along the Way
For our customers, the practical meaning is straightforward: the systems handling your maps, datasets, and field data are now governed by the same internationally recognized security framework trusted by banks, hospitals, and government agencies worldwide. Whether it’s parcel data, infrastructure maps, or field survey records, it’s protected by audited controls across every layer that touches it.
Most of the work to achieve certification was deliberately invisible to end users — by design. The platform you log into looks the same. Behind it, the areas we hardened and documented include:
- Access management — tighter control over who can access what, with regular access reviews
- Encryption — robust encryption in transit and at rest for all customer data
- Incident response — documented playbooks and tested procedures for any security event
- Supplier security — every third-party vendor we rely on is assessed for security risk
- Business continuity — regular testing of backups, recovery and disaster recovery procedures
- Secure development — security checks integrated into every step of how we ship code
- Infrastructure security — hardened controls across all hosting and operational environments
- People and training — every member of the team trained on security policies, incident handling, and customer data discipline
This was a company-wide effort spanning DevOps, Engineering, QA, Customer Success, and leadership. The certification we received reflects something that is now part of how every team works day-to-day — not a layer bolted on for audit.
Get Your Copy of the Certificate & Security Info
If you’d like a copy of our ISO 27001 certificate, a summary of the controls in our scope, or to discuss security in the context of a specific project or RFP, reach out to your account manager or contact us at support@giscloud.com. We can also support your internal security review with walk-throughs, documentation, or a sit-down with our engineering team — the certificate is meant to make these reviews easier, not replace them.
If you’re in the middle of a procurement process and need supporting documentation quickly, tell us that — we have a packaged set of materials ready to send.
A Milestone, Not a Finish Line
ISO 27001 closes a long-running gap and opens doors that have been closed to us in some markets. Earning the certificate was the baseline — and the certification itself is the guarantee that we keep improving. The standard requires continuous improvement: if we haven’t advanced from where we were at the previous audit, we don’t pass. As threats evolve and our platform grows, our security program is required to evolve with it — and is independently audited against that requirement every year. We will continue to be transparent about how we work, what we change, and how we protect your data.
Thank you for trusting GIS Cloud with your geospatial data. This certification is for you.
About GIS Cloud
GIS Cloud is a cloud-based platform for collecting, managing, sharing, and analyzing geospatial data. Trusted by organizations in over 60 countries — across government, utilities, engineering, environmental, and field operations — GIS Cloud helps teams turn location data into faster, smarter decisions.
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