Organizations are struggling to keep up with numerous regulations and best practices that were being managed with spreadsheets and homegrown applications, using expensive armies of consultants. Considering the rising requirements of manpower and cost results, they were slow, manual processes that opened opportunities for inaccuracy and error, impediments to business performance, increased business risk exposures, and difficulty in responding to auditors, regulators and partner requirements.
As the requirements for accountability, oversight and identifying the business risks were accelerating with new regulations, security breaches and fines, reporting to target stakeholders was turning out to be challanging. This led to the introduction of automated Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) solutions, but the new solutions had their own challenges of being complex and expensive to implement. Therefore, Allgress brought forward an easy-to-use automated solution with a common integrated approach that provided quick-time-to-value for all aspects of risk and compliance management. The company designed the software to reduce the complexity of legacy approaches and enable multiple people to work off the same data from identification to taking necessary action in less time and cost.
Founded in 2008, Allgress, Inc. is a global provider of automated and next-generation IT security, compliance and risk management solution that helps enterprise security and risk professionals to solve the problems of how to assess, understand and manage corporate risk.
Bringing A Change in Risk Management
While starting out, Allgress got its fair share of challenges from innovations, changes in technology, business processes, and the evolving business ecosystem. But the firm held its grounds and engaged with the industry groups, businesses, practitioners and customers. In addition, it focused on listening, learning and getting feedback from its customers. The team at Allgress brought their real-world industry experience forward and designed a solution so that their customers can effectively take advantage of all the benefits that the firm brings to them.
Allgress understands that the major challenge that organizations face while managing their risk and compliance is complexity, which comes from using the homegrown or sophisticated tools from vendors. The complexity, when coupled with innovations in technology, business, adoption of cloud computing and IoT, and changing regulations like CCPA, turns into a bigger challenge.
However, the Allgress platform makes it easier for the customers to track changes in the market environment by consuming data from devices and data sources that they have in place and continuously comparing risk objectives to their current state. This enables organizations to get visibility of how continuous changes can affect their risk posture. In consequence, they can further determine whether they need to make corrections or
create exceptions to accept the presented risks.
Improving Business Decisions with Process Automation
Allgress aims to help its customers and business partners by implementing process automation, which is a much better, efficient, and cost-effective way to reduce business risks. The Allgress platform presents the risks visually so that the target audience finds it easy to understand, be it the executive management, the business unit leader, or the technological audience. Once they are clear about the risks, they can direct the control of those risks to meet their goals and objectives. “We focus on our customers’ most pervasive issues that will result in a strategic, operational, financial, and reputational risk and help them to manage their risk objectives in an efficient and effective way with the least amount of impact on their organizations,” says the company.
Allgress Risk Management Suite (IRMS) v7
The Allgress Insight Risk Management Suite (IRMS) v7 is the latest release of its award-winning, integrated risk and compliance management platform. Allgress makes it possible for organizations and their business partners to automate and reduce their business risk, with less complexity and cost.
The Allgress IRMS provides a common infrastructure that streamlines the entire risk lifecycle, compliance, IT security, and third-party vendor management in the cloud or on-premise. With the ability to correlate multiple data sources, an organization can input technical, procedural, and operational control information, as well as traditional assessment data to produce visual reports that are relevant to different audiences and stakeholders, and create actionable data with full life-cycle management, all within the application directly.
Updates included in version 7 are a completely redesigned UI and navigation, full risk exception life cycle management, risk assurance, a new reporting wizard and metrics platform, third-party integrations, and smart surveys with skip logic, more out-of-box regulations, standard mappings and much more. Version 7 has also streamlined the entire process of reviewing risk items and approving steps. Once approval is granted at one level, it is automatically passed to the next level. If an item is rejected, it gets sent back to the requester. Assessments,
remediations, reviews, and approvals can all be tracked then continuously communicated to stakeholders.
The Roadmap Ahead
Organizations want to improve efficiency, communicate their risk posture quicker, increase automation, have
the same management capability they get in their current on-prem environments in the cloud, and consume data from additional IT and non-IT data sources with responsive customer support. Allgress has addressed many of those capabilities in its newest release and will continue to address further customer challenges by automating more of the entire end-to-end IRM process with customizable logic and dashboards focused on the function of
the user and robotic process automation using APIs,
bots and AI.
“Allgress provides superior ease of use, time to value and lower cost of ownership compared to many other
solutions available on the market,” saysJeffKushner, CMO.
The Thought Leader
Jeff Kushner, CMO
Jeff Kushner leads marketing at Allgress as the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and has been with the company since July 2012. As CMO, he is responsible for the global marketing strategy, branding, positioning, and market communications. Jeff brings over 30 years of experience in a variety of leadership roles in technology marketing and business development.
Before Allgress, Jeff has held positions that increased revenue and market penetration with market leaders including BindView (now Symantec), BMC Software, Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) and consulting to many organizations. His efforts have been instrumental in advancing the development and adoption of application, compliance, and risk management.
“We recognized for leading achievements in providing efficiency through automation without complexity seen in homegrown application and other solution in risk and compliance management.”
