Make This Your Day of Compliance Independence

There’s almost nothing that Americans celebrate more than our freedom. Independence Day isn’t just a one day celebration — it’s a driving ethic of our daily culture. We value independence in all its forms more than any other country.

Part of TCT’s mission is to provide a new level of independence to professionals in the security and compliance arena. We want to help your company gain independence from vendor lock-in with Assessors who control your compliance information.

There are so many organizations that become dependent on their Service Providers and Assessors, in terms of systematically managing their compliance.

Don’t Become Dependent on Your Assessor

Back in the day, Assessors were the only ones that had or could afford or spent the time to make systems that could manage compliance evidence. It was either that, or companies would blow up time and effort internally creating a mechanism (often manually) for feeding information into the Assessor’s system.

As a result, Assessors often collect evidence from their clients and organize it on their own proprietary systems. From your auditor’s perspective, a proprietary auditing system that works for them makes a lot of sense. But not if you’re the client.

If you’re the client, you’re giving up control of your data. You’re the one with the evidence and the policies. It’s your information, and it belongs to you. But what happens when your only real, consolidated system of record belongs to an Assessment firm that uses their own proprietary system?

Because your only organized repository is your Assessor’s system, you’ve become dependent on a vendor. You can only access it for as long as you stay with that Assessment firm. If you switch firms, sure, you can likely get an extract from their system, but it’s likely going to be a primarily unusable zip file with a dump truck of files. You’re right back to square one, with a painful and disorganized file drop as your only repository from the past. Plus, you get the joy of starting over with the next Assessor.

Thankfully, that landscape has now changed. From its inception, TCT Portal was designed to help companies manage compliance more efficiently, and to maintain control over their information despite vendor changes.

We help companies like yours to gain independence by giving them their own repository for their own data. No matter what happens, whether you switch out Assessors or hire multiple Assessors, you’re in control of your data. You always have immediate access when you need it. And it’s always in a format that is organized and familiar to your organization, since you license the compliance management software for your own company.

Not only is your own independence good for your company — TCT’s independence is good for your company as well.

Why TCT Is Fiercely Independent

When I stepped away from working for somebody else to help people in the compliance space, one of things that was very important to me was that TCT maintained its independence. Not because I was too proud to accept help, but because our independence is good for our customers.

In the security and compliance space, it’s becoming very common for companies to get bought out by huge enterprise behemoths. Time and time again, the customers who depended on the agile, moderately sized company are transitioned to a statistic and are at the will of the enterprise organization. And because the enterprise behemoth bought the organization, they can do whatever they want with it. They could shut it down, or they could force you to migrate to their enterprise system, which you didn’t pick, and may even have avoided in the past.

We didn’t build TCT with the goal of getting acquired, we built it because we care about helping people. In fact, TCT has repeatedly been approached with acquisition offers, and our response has always been the same: we’re not for sale.

Our customers can rest in the certainty that TCT won’t get bought out or sold to some other organization, just to be folded up into a megalithic machine. We intend to maintain our own independence from investors and other parties who have a differing vision for the business.

We believe it’s in our customers’ best interests for TCT to maintain our independence, and you have our commitment to stay fiercely independent.

This Independence Day, the TCT crew will be celebrating the freedoms we enjoy as a nation and as a company. We hope you’ll have a joyful celebration as well. Happy Independence Day!