“We realized we needed something better for cybersecurity “We built a very scalable, very nimble platform from that need.”

Mitigating cybersecurity risk is daunting enough for organizations, but ensuring proper compliancy and certification assessments presents new and complex challenges. The point, however, is that it doesn’t need to be so complex. For RealCISO, a small but mighty team of cybersecurity experts, building a scalable platform for customers that monitors and keeps track of cybersecurity regulations, risks, mitigation tactics, and next steps started from the idea that a better solution was not just possible, but needed. “We realized we needed something better for cybersecurity,” Brian Haugli, Co-Founder of RealCISO, says. “We built a very scalable, very nimble platform from that need.”

RealCISO is a web-based, scalable and cost-effective platform that allows customers to assess, build, and manage cybersecurity compliance for their own organizations or for their clients. vCISO is specifically designed for cybersecurity consultants or vCISO’s themselves that can now better manage different clients from one centralized platform with no compromise to efficiency.

RealCISO is built around offerings that seek to make compliance operable, understandable, and easier than ever before. “There’s a lot of misunderstanding with GRC. People make it harder than it should be,” Haugli says. “I think a lot of the problem is most people look at every regulation separately from each other and the reality is that most compliance frameworks are all based in the same concepts, so if you're able to do something once for one regulation, it probably means you’re going to be able to adopt and scale from there for the next one.”

A monolithic approach to compliancy not only makes certification processes harder, but also time-consuming. For instance, companies thinking that, once they’ve achieved SOC-2 certification, they need to start from the ground up to pass ISO are missing how the approaches instead can be tied together. Companies and service providers initiating cybersecurity frameworks deal with the same fundamental problems, no matter their size. The regulations stay the same, but it’s the controls management that makes a difference in scaling a customizable cybersecurity posture. RealCISO builds out their programs to eliminate the need for spreadsheets at all; instead, the intuitive nature of the platform can detect overlap, leading to an upscale in a company’s framework faster and more efficiently. For instance, RealCISO is able to find “73% control overlap between NIST and ISO. Two completely different frameworks. For consultants on their own, that would take them months to do. We've done all the backend work to basically, in two buttons, manage and map all assessments. We’re able to say, ‘You’ve completed this assessment, let's launch and see where you are in an ISO assessment and then… boom you’re already 73% of the way there’,” Haugli explains.

For consultants or vCISO’s themselves, the adoption of RealCISO upscales their efforts to expand even more. By working through RealCISO, consultants are able to take on more clientele at reduced rates, leading to even more revenue generating opportunities. As Haugli shows some of the RealCISO platform online, one can’t help but think about how adoptable and easy to use the platform is. Assessments are listed with real-time insights. Client assessments are made instantaneously, allowing more coverage and better reporting. Any regulation that a customer needs to comply with is added to their portfolio and RealCiso can develop an at-a-glance report that quickly identifies performance and gaps. Not only that, but the RealCISO platform then offers actionable insights that companies can use to close those percentage gaps to acquire a full 100% certification rate---quick, cost-effective, scalable, automatic, and intuitive so that anyone can have oversight.

By having such an intuitive, easy-to-use, and scalable platform, RealCISO has not only helped customers measure where they are in their regulation journeys, but also allowed them to make better and more informed decisions by offering remediation support. “I can see exactly what controls I need to meet and how,” Haugli explains.

Whether an independent provider or organizational GRC body, compliance is all about staying on top of evolving infrastructure and regulations. “You need to assess the framework you choose to live within and make sure it continues to work as it needs to. Coupled with looking at outside threats-- what risks are on the horizon? What risks are pertinent to my organization, to the industry I'm in? No company can do everything. But making choices and monitoring it is the most important thing a company can do,” Haugli says.

Over 2300 companies currently use RealCISO, and the company’s growth is coupled with their values as an organization. “Our platform was built by Real CISOs. That's kind of why we named it that way. It evolved out of necessity. We want to build the lowest cost, most nimble infrastructure we can,” Haugli concludes.