Is Your Compliance Tool Forcing You into a Mold?

Your Assessment firm’s secret sauce is your process. It’s what sets you apart from other firms, it’s one of your core differentiators. This is where the magic happens. So why the hell would you ever purchase a third party compliance management platform that forces you to conform to the software?

This is one of many reasons so many Assessment firms build their own homegrown systems. They may not be robust, and they may not be user friendly, but at least they let your Assessors run engagements the way your organization wants.

So you can either go with a homegrown Frankensystem that you now need to spend precious resources maintaining, or you can purchase a third-party platform that forces you to do things their way.

There is another option. TCT Portal is the compliance management system that actually, truly, lets you run client engagements the way you want to. The compliance software is designed to bend to your needs so you can do things your way.

Here’s how TCT Portal stands out from other platforms to let you run engagements your way.

Related: How Does TCT’s Compliance Management Software Compare to the Competition?

100% Your Processes

Most third-party compliance tools boast about their flexibility, but the fact is they still have varying degrees of rigidity. They’ll bend only so far, but then your organization needs to fit in their mold. You’re still making adjustments to your process that you would never have made otherwise. Whatever your regular process is today, you’ll have to fit it into the new system somehow.

TCT Portal bends to your processes, 100 percent. We have dozens of Assessment firms on TCT Portal today, and very few of them are similar to one another. They each have their own way of doing things. In every instance, the compliance management platform easily and efficiently facilitates their unique engagement processes.

Not only can you run your own process in TCT Portal, but you can run it more effectively than ever before. Give your secret sauce a kick.

For example, let’s say you need to tweak your template in the middle of the year. With TCT Portal, you can update your guidance or example files, which automatically and immediately populate to all of your clients — not just the clients that you engage with after you’ve tweaked it. And you can do it at the click of a button.

You’ll also optimize your process through enhanced collaboration. TCT Portal allows multiple team members to work on the same engagement at the same time. No more waiting on other people before you can do your work.

You can even structure different types of engagements in different ways. Maybe you run PCI engagements differently from HIPAA engagements. Perhaps you have a different process for small clients than for enterprise organizations. You don’t have to fit all of your engagement types into one structure and suck it up. TCT’s system is extremely flexible and customizable. (We like to call it Fleximizable.)

No need to contort yourself to a third party software system in order to make it work. Why should you bend over backwards to fit someone else’s idea of how you should run your engagements? Your process is your secret sauce — don’t lose that advantage.

If your compliance management solution makes you change your processes to fit them, you’re using the wrong system. TCT Portal was built from the ground up to manage any type of engagement.

Discover why compliance Assessors are calling TCT Portal a lifesaver

A Truly End-to-end Compliance Tool

If your compliance management system is truly letting you do things the way you want, then it won’t force you to bump back and forth between different systems. It will be the only system you need for managing your client engagements — from the very start to the very end.

Many third-party systems will handle a large chunk of the work that’s involved in a client engagement, but not everything. You can store all of your evidence in the system, but there’s no integration with communication tools. Or you can compile and export all of your evidence to create the final report, but you’re on your own for the actual report generation.

It doesn’t make any sense to consolidate all of your compliance information into one spot, only to have your Assessors doing the work in other applications. That means you’re using multiple systems, which means you’ve built inefficiencies into the overall process.

That’s the opposite of a tool that lets you do things your way.

TCT Portal is literally the only tool you need for managing compliance. The system handles every aspect of a compliance engagement, including:

• Engagement evidence collection and organization
• Engagement written explanations
• Client and internal communications — with historical records
• Activity log at both requirement and overall certification levels
• Ability to make comments on items during status calls
• Automated reminders for upcoming and overdue tasks
• Real-time status tracking
• Automated mapping between certifications
• Customized template capabilities
• One-click report generation
• Capability for custom reporting templates
• Whitelabeling of the solution

Discover how to automate report generation with the click of a button.

Manage Every Compliance Framework

There are a lot of compliance management systems that are built for a particular standard, or a certain set of standards. It doesn’t make sense to invest in any compliance solution unless it can be your only compliance solution. Why should you operate within two or three or more systems, simply because you’re running two or three or more types of engagements?

That doesn’t solve your problem, it only introduces new ones.

When we built TCT Portal, we wanted the system to be the last piece of software that anyone would need to invest in for compliance management — whether they’re going up against SOC, PCI, HIPAA, ISO, NIST or anything else. TCT Portal can help you manage every type of compliance standard your organization needs to assess.

When the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification was introduced in 2021, the cool part is that TCT Portal was already capable of incorporating CMMC within our platform.

If your organization is managing multiple certifications for clients, make sure your compliance management tool checks these boxes:

• Management and tracking for every certification you serve
• Capability to perform mapping between certifications
• Capability to customize the mappings between your certifications
• Custom request lists that consolidate the noise for your clients yet map back to standardized certifications
• Customized reporting from the system with the click of a button

If your compliance management system isn’t letting you do all those things, it’s time to reconsider your system.

This guide will give you the basics of PCI and help you figure out how to make your certification journey as simple as possible.

Don’t Conform to Someone Else’s Way

For decades, Assessment firms assumed that they would have to make certain compromises when purchasing a third-party compliance tool, or building their own. They’d have to conform to the demands of the software to make it work. But when any compliance management tool forces you to do things their way instead of yours, you give up a bit of your secret sauce and become more generic.

TCT Portal was built by compliance professionals who have gotten their hands dirty in every aspect of compliance management. We’ve been in the trenches and we know firsthand what Assessors need to be successful. So we built a platform that would be flexible enough to meet those needs — and robust enough to deliver those needs reliably.

Don’t settle for a compliance tool that forces you to conform to its way of doing things. Run compliance engagements the way YOU want, without constraints.

Hiring the right C3PAO is only one small piece of successfully navigating the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification. Get fully equipped with TCT’s online guide to CMMC.

Check out TCT Portal for yourself.