CASE STUDY
The Office for Students (OfS) is the
independent regulator of higher
education in England, responsible
for ensuring that all undergraduate and
postgraduate students, whatever their
backgrounds, have a fulfilling experience of
higher education which enriches their lives
and careers and delivers value for money. It
is headquartered in Bristol, England, with a
workforce of around 450 people.
Challenge
Higher Education Funding Council for
England (HEFCE), Office for Students’
predecessor, become a client of SureCloud
back in 2017, implementing the GDPR Data
Privacy Management Suite to support and
enhance its GDPR programme. As a new
organisation and a successor of HEFCE,
Office for Students has been looking to
mature its approach to risk management.
The focus of this for the team was initially
to improve risk policies and procedures,
to develop internal capability, enhance
reporting to show transparency and allow
challenge, and to identify and manage
risks enterprise-wide systematically. These
improvements established a highly effective
risk management approach, but the
organisation soon hit the ceiling in terms
of its process supporting risk systems, with
technology being a limiting factor rather
than an enabler. The organisation was
relying on numerous disparate spreadsheets
to assess and monitor different types of
risk – these were inconsistent, timeconsuming
and error-prone. Office for
Students needed a single, seamless,
enterprise-wide solution to manage and
monitor all aspects of risk management.
Introducing SureCloud’s risk
management services
Office for Students has been a SureCloud
client for cybersecurity services since March
2017 and began deploying SureCloud’s
governance, risk and compliance (GRC)
solution in July 2017 to assist with the
organisation’s responsibilities under GDPR.
Knowing that SureCloud also offered a
comprehensive risk management solution
(recognised on Gartner’s IRM Magic
Quadrant), which could be tailored to its
precise needs, Office for Students opened
a conversation with SureCloud about how
best to configure its existing SureCloud Data
Privacy Risk Management Solution to enable
enterprise risk management. SureCloud’s risk
management product delivers:
• A central view of risk across the organisation
via a single intuitive dashboard
• Risks organised across divisions,
legal entities, business functions
and geographies
• The ability to provide a central repository
for enterprise risk, allow the organisation
to show the entirety of the risk
environment and consider overlaps
and interdependences
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