Agiliance Rolls Out New GRC Offering To Support Business Continuity

The Agiliance ISO 22301 Content Pack helps organizations develop strategies, policies and procedures aimed at effective and immediate response to a wide range of operational disruptions, such as natural disasters, technology flaws, cyber-attacks and other unforeseen developments that can grind business to a standstill.

"Many companies are still struggling with the process of developing effective business continuity strategies," said Torsten George, vice president of worldwide marketing and products at Agiliance. "We provide them with the guidance that was given by ISO 22301 to really break the processes into digestible steps and help them to implement best practices in their organization. This helps them to really enhance organizational preparedness that will be extremely useful when an incident occurs. We also give them the necessary workflows and automation tools that allow them to centralize all of this."

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Risks are defined, categorized and mapped to various organizations within the client company, based on the specific circumstances of each individual threat. A comprehensive catalog facilitates the development of checklists for incident response, as well as for post-event evaluation of response.

"Our customers use the newly-developed risk catalog with the ISO guidance to develop the best practices and checklists," explained George. "They then load that information into our existing product, which has a workflow engine, assessment programs and a document repository, where the response checklists are not only stored but can also be refined, based on whatever changes need to be made. Then, when an incident occurs, they can use that same platform to manage response and gather post-event data."

The corresponding RiskVision software platform is delivered on premise, or it can be provided as a managed service in the cloud environment under certain circumstances. Various purpose-built applications perform functions around compliance, policy management, vendor risk management, incident management and threat vulnerability management. Customers can opt for the complete solution or roll it out in incremental phases, if they prefer. "Many of our customers start out with compliance manager and policy manager and then extend the use," said George. "We take a number of silo-based feeds and then analyze that information based on business impact and use it to produce a prioritization list for the remediation actions.

"We have a channel first philosophy," added George. "We work with the big four consultancies, but also with security resellers who are really entrenched in the accounts. Channel partners know better about the pain points of an organization than anybody on the vendor side, so from that perspective we definitely want our channel community to embrace this opportunity, and provide guidance to their customers and help their customers streamline their operational efficiency."

The Agiliance ISO 22301 Content Pack is available immediately. It requires an ISO third-party license.

PUBLISHED SEPT. 7, 2012

This story was updated on Sept. 10, 2012, at 8:51 a.m. PST, to correct for the company's location in Sunnyvale, Calif.