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Understanding security risk across an organization is often a complex task, but a new platform announced Jan. 30 by TechDemocracy could make it easier. The TechDemocracy Intellicta platform aims to provide organizations with insight and visibility into security risks and compliance.
“The intent of Intellicta is to provide an end-to-end holistic view of an organization from a risk management perspective,” Ken Pfeil, chief architect at TechDemocracy, told eWEEK.
Pfeil added that the Intellicta platform incorporates a wide range of existing standards, including ISO and NIST guidelines, as well providing TechDemocracy’s own insights and enabling organizations to define their own policies. A core premise of the platform is to provide business-level context and insight, rather than just having technical details pulled from security point products.
Among the metrics that the Intellicta platform provides is one called the Breachability Index.
“The Breachability Index is the probability, based on the information collected, how likely it is that an organization will be breached,” Pfeil said.
The TechDemocracy Intellicta system also includes a financial analysis component to help quantify the potential impact of a breach or a security control failure. Pfeil noted that the ability to measure the financial impact of security can also help to inform cyber-insurance decisions. With cyber-insurance, organizations typically need to understand how much risk the business faces in order to be able to make sure they have enough coverage.
Gautam Dev, global managing principal at TechDemocracy, said that his firm has been working on the technology behind Intellicta for the past several years. As a company, TechDemocracy in the past has been primarily focused on identity and access management. Dev said that the new Intellicta platform is an expansion and evolution of technologies and experience developed by TechDemocracy.
Intellicta has a continuous assessment model that aims to make it easier for organizations to have an accurate view of risk. Dev noted that typically trying to find specific areas of vulnerability and risk in an organization is like trying to find the proverbial needle in the haystack, which is a situation that Intellicta is aiming to solve.
“Through the Intellicta platform’s situational awareness, we shrink the size of the haystack so that the needle becomes pretty clear,” Dev said.
Dev explained that Intellicta provides out-of-the-box situational rules based on threat feeds to help understand the risk of any activity going on within an enterprise. In terms of compliance, Intellicta has a unified control matrix that maps compliance requirements to situational rules.
“We map each situational rule to a control and give each control a risk rating and a financial value,” Dev said.
Understanding and mapping risk is a growing area of technology with multiple vendors in the market today, including Bay Dynamics among others. Dev explained that TechDemocracy aims to differentiate Intellicta from others in the market place by being focused on situational awareness rather than user behavior analytics.
“Intellicta is an open system where organizations can define situations with any number of different systems being integrated,” Dev said. “We’re all about intelligent risk assurance.”
Looking forward, Dev said that TechDemocracy will continue to evolve the Intellicta platform with additional capabilities.
“The idea is to further close the loop in the system so we can identify risk and compliance issues,” Dev said. “We have a very strong roadmap ahead.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.