According to the Kettering-based business, more and more public and private sector businesses are requesting the standard as part of their supplier selection criteria.

Lance Hill, managing director of print services at 4DM, said: "Some might say it's just another box ticked along with ISO9001, ISO14001, ISO12647-2, FSC and PEFC, but data security is that bit more sensitive.

"We already had an excellent data-handling structure in place but we needed to tighten up in a few areas to achieve the status."

The financial services industry is one of the main sectors to which ISO 27001 relates and 4DM said that the standard would allow it to start producing transactional work for financial clients.

"As well as opening up new customer opportunities it also enables us to participate in transactional mail as well as traditional DM," said Hill.

4DM's accreditation follows a spate of recent incidents where data breaches have been blamed on "printer error", including one involving the HMRC last month and one involving Skipton Building Society in February.