Preconfigured Certification Tracks Save Time, Effort, and Sanity

For Assessors and Consultants, one of the most tedious and wasteful parts of a client engagement is the very beginning. During the setup phase, you have to deliver the same set of documents, provide the same information, answer the same questions, and go through the same configurations. Every fricking time.

Not only is engagement setup painfully tedious, it’s a waste of time. That’s especially true if you’re running a highly prescriptive compliance assessment like PCI DSS 4.

Compliance engagements like PCI have almost 600 items to get dispositioned. For most Assessors and Consultants, that requires hours of configuration in tediously difficult spreadsheets before your actual work with the client even begins.

As a result, Assessors and Consultants can feel depleted before the real client work even begins. 

The TCT Portal compliance management platform lets you skip all of the manual preconfiguration setup for certification tracks with just a click of a button for each client engagement.

Assessor Templates in TCT Portal

Our Assessor Templates provide fully configured certification tracks that allow you to hit the ground running with compliance engagements.

With TCT’s customizable Assessor templates, you have the ability to preset the starting points for each engagement. Prepopulate item assignments, preload examples and guidance, and provide sample templates. Everything your clients need is available on Day One, with no configuration required.

• Use the template to explain how your engagements with clients work.
• Fill it with all of the documentation and resources your customers repeatedly ask for.
• Add comments and explanatory notes that answer your frequently asked questions.

Provide instructions and guidance you know your clients will need. Better yet — the guidance from your template updates go out live to all of your active engagements that leverage that particular template. 

When a client asks your team a new question you haven’t seen before, you can add the question and response to the template guidance, and direct them to check the guidance tab. You will not only have addressed their inquiry, but in the future when a client asks the same question, the answer will already be there. 

All you need to do is train the clients to review the guidance tab and they’ll have the information they need immediately accessible. It’s really quite magical.

Service Provider Templates in TCT Portal

TCT Portal has a way to eliminate all of that initial manual setup activity that you’re currently doing when responding to every client engagement. Our Service Provider Templates provide fully configured certification tracks that allow you to hit the ground running with compliance engagements.

Service Provider Templates can be automatically applied on top of your client’s existing compliance engagement. If you have clients that struggle to keep their security / compliance tracks organized, introduce them to TCT Portal. When you apply your Service Provider template, everything is populated right where it needs to be, with preconfigured presets you’ve determined they need. There’s no need to do any manual sorting, setup, or organizing. 

• Fill the template with all of the documentation and commentary you know your customers will need for their security / compliance needs.
• Provide instructions and guidance you know your clients will need, including comments and explanatory notes that answer your frequently asked questions.

Once your Service Provider templates are configured, application of your template to a client engagement is as simple as a single request. All of the requirements your organization needs to respond to are instantly completed. The delivery of your responses are consistent, complete and your client will thank you.

Streamline Your PCI DSS 4 Engagements

PCI’s Yes/No checkboxes can be a pain, especially related to customized approaches. When you have clients that don’t take a customized approach, that’s a lot of “No” checkboxes you have to go through. TCT Portal’s templates functionality lets you automate the completion of each of those checkboxes. 

For example, if your client doesn’t have a customized approach to PCI DSS for a particular requirement, TCT Portal will automatically default to “No” and fill in those checkboxes for you. If you do use a customized approach, the system automatically selects “Yes” in all the appropriate spots. 

Your client simply needs to do their normal engagement work, then press a button — the final reporting is generated with all the appropriate Yes/No selections filled out.

PCI also provides a field that allows you to explain why you chose to approach a control in a particular manner. If your clients aren’t using customized approaches, you might choose to provide text that calls it out: “Not applicable — this organization did not need to leverage a customized approach for this item.” (You aren’t required to fill in the field, but depending on the QSA they prefer to do it anyway.)

TCT Portal’s template lets you add explanatory text to make it clear that your client didn’t use a customized approach, and why they didn’t. 

Related: TCT Portal Flattens the Learning Curve of PCI DSS 4.0

Multiple Templates for Multiple Scenarios

One engagement configuration approach doesn’t fit all clients. TCT Portal gives you the ability to create multiple templates for various security standards and client scenarios. For example, create a template that shows no wireless, and create another one that shows no POS devices. 

You can create any number of templates to match the various scenarios of your clients. No matter what your client’s needs are, TCT’s templates let you hit the ground running from the very start of every engagement.

Onboard New Personnel Faster

Typically, there’s a lot of handholding when you have new Assessors or Consultants join your firm. Even simple procedures need explanation, because you have your own company way of doing things. 

TCT Portal’s templates eliminate some of the tedious onboarding process. Skip the walkthroughs of client setup and just show new hires how to select the right template. You don’t have to hope that they can figure out all the right places for specific things, and you can spend less time explaining procedures. Instead, rest assured that your newest personnel can replicate your processes consistently during an engagement, starting on Day One.

Need to Update a Template? No Problem.

As your firm updates its guidance, processes, and explanatory material, you’ll need to push out those changes to your templates — including templates that clients are already using. With traditional templates, you have to hunt down every instance that’s in use and communicate the switch to the client and why it’s being made.

Not with TCT Portal. When you update guidance in a TCT template and make it live, that change is automatically implemented across every single client engagement that’s using that template. There’s no risk of missing deprecated templates or dealing with clients that accidentally got left behind. Every client is always using your latest and greatest template.

Compliance Management That Sucks Less

From the very beginning, TCT Portal compliance management software was built to make compliance management suck less. The template functionality is just one of many features that provide massive benefits for Assessors, Consultants, and Service Providers. 

Get your clients’ compliance engagements started faster, with less tedium and manual labor on your end. Request a demo and see how much time you can save with TCT Portal.