Strike Graph security compliance blog

Closing deals the easy way: see what a difference Strike Graph makes

Written by Justin Beals : Founder & CEO | Jan 28, 2024 8:00:00 AM

Let's get straight to what's most important to your business: closing deals. 

How do you close more deals faster? By building trust. And how do you do that? With an effective, streamlined security compliance platform that allows you to easily prove that your company is compliant. In other words — Strike Graph. 

Read on for an in-depth look at exactly how Strike Graph helps boost your business by giving you the tools to establish your company’s trustworthiness quickly and effectively.

Ah, the dreaded security questionnaire. These questions, sent by your customers’ procurement departments and often placed in the lap of the CIO or another IT lead, can range anywhere from 20 questions to more than 100.

Without Strike Graph

If you’re still manually filling out a different questionnaire for every single prospective client, you’re wasting a lot of precious time, money, and human resources. Every potential client’s procurement department has its own, unique take on security review — from the type of info they want to the format they want it in. And, all of this info has to be sourced from different departments within your organization. Doing that process manually over and over and over is a tremendous resource drain and stress on your team.

With Strike Graph

There’s a faster, easier way to complete security questionnaires. Strike Graph’s AI-powered response engine uses your existing controls to fill out all of your security questionnaires automatically. Simply upload your security questionnaire, let our AI tool map your existing controls to each question or line item, sit back, and get your completed security response report within 48 hours. 

Trust assets — like security certifications — are proof that your company meets the highest data security and privacy standards. And, they’re your ticket to bigger and better deals. They also traditionally have been very expensive and time consuming to achieve.

Without Strike Graph

Data security and privacy is complex, and so is proving you’re doing it right. You have to understand one or more complicated frameworks, perform in-depth risk assessments, decipher which controls you need to implement, choose the right evidence, and then manually track that evidence down and log it. This isn’t even to mention the expense and time suck of traditional audits once you have all of your evidence ready. And,  without a way to use the work you’ve already done to meet one security framework to renew your certification or meet the requirements of another, your team will have to spend a lot of time and money working on every single security certification from scratch. 

With Strike Graph

Strike Graph simplifies the process, guiding you step by step from risk assessment through audit. Our comprehensive platform not only gives you the tools — like our in-platform risk assessment — to identify your company’s unique risks and mitigate them, it also helps you operate your security program with smart features like automated evidence collection and our AI security assistant. And, our tech-enabled audits mean you can achieve security certifications without the expense and delay of a traditional auditing firm.

And, Strike Graph’s multi-framework approach means you never start from scratch on a new certification. When you enable a new framework within the platform, it automatically maps to any appropriate existing controls. And, any attached evidence applies to all of your frameworks as well, saving you a ton of time and resources. 

In fact, our customer DocuPhase reported spending 50% less time achieving HIPAA compliance thanks to Strike Graph’s multi-framework mapping capabilities letting them build on prior SOC 2 compliance.

Real-time reporting

Certifications are the gold standard — but what about while you’re working toward them or in between audits? Real-time reporting gives your customers (and potential customers) the confidence that you’re keeping their data secure every single day. 

Without Strike Graph

Without a platform that supports real-time reporting, the only way to give stakeholders a up-to-the minute look into your security program is to conduct manual check-ins with different teams and documentation. That means creating some sort of document or spreadsheet that links to various pieces of evidence, policies, and/or controls that you’d then have to go in and manually verify. We’re talking manually evaluating every policy, every piece of evidence, and every control to make sure they’re up-to-date, being used consistently across your organization, and more, any time you need to report on your security. And that, put simply, would be an impossibly heavy lift for any team.

With Strike Graph

Strike Graph’s security overview report and dashboards allow you to easily share real-time security status updates with customers and stakeholders — no manual work required. 

Our security overview report lets you prove at any given moment that you have active controls in place mitigating your company's unique data and privacy risks and explicitly how you’re committed to and actively protecting customer data and privacy. And, you can customize it to include the risks and controls that are most pertinent to a specific customer or lead. The security overview report is also faster and more up-to-date than a security certification, meaning you can prove your company has robust security measures even before receiving a formal certification. 

Strike Graph’s dashboards give you instant visibility into which controls are active, which still need to be implemented (if any), what percent of evidence is up to date, notification of which evidence is due for updating, and more. This real-time reporting gives your team the information they need to keep your security program functioning as intended at all times.

Third-party security consultants

Many companies, especially small to mid-sized businesses, don’t have in-house security compliance expertise. That’s a hurdle when it comes to reaching and maintaining security compliance.

Without Strike Graph

The traditional solution to this problem is to hire expensive, third-party security compliance consultants to meet the security and privacy demands of potential customers. But consultants are expensive and are motivated by hourly billing to work slower rather than faster. This doesn’t only mean adding a ton of time to the process, but a lot of dollar signs, too. Not to mention, working with a security consultant for audit prep, a pen or vulnerability testing company for pen tests, and then a traditional auditing firm for the actual auditing process can mean a lot of cooks in the kitchen, a lot of mismatched processes, and a lot of confusion and wasted resources overall.

With Strike Graph

Because Strike Graph is an all-in-one compliance and certification platform, you won’t need to worry about hiring expensive, third-party consultants or auditing firms. We’ll get you to certification swiftly, painlessly, and for a fraction of the price — even if you’re a security novice. Our one-stop solution means you’ll be able to accomplish all the work that would typically have to be farmed out to various vendors:

  • Simply and efficiently design your security program — Strike Graph walks you through each aspect of the process step by step.
  • Easily mitigate risk using our pre-populated control library.
  • Effortlessly attach evidence to prove your controls are working with our low-code integrations.
  • Complete vulnerability scanning with our internal assessment team.
  • Answer all of your questions about security, compliance, and certification with our in-depth educational resources and a team of experts to back you up when you have additional questions or concerns.

At the end of the day, you have to have a mechanism to turn your security activities into revenue — but how? 

Without Strike Graph

Disorganized reporting and documentation prevent you from effectively conveying your trustworthiness to potential clients. If you don’t have trust assets — or if your team doesn't know which trust assets to use — you won’t be able to leverage your security efforts to prove your business is trustworthy. This means that all that time spent carrying out those activities is essentially a waste of your team’s time. 

With Strike Graph

You need to have your trust assets organized so you can share the right trust asset quickly with potential customers in order to close deals. Strike Graph’s trust asset library keeps all your trust assets up to date and organized in one centralized place and gives your team the tools to easily share trust assets (like certifications) with potential customers. Access, view, use, and share the most up-to-date versions of all of your company’s trust assets with handy filters to help you find exactly what you need when you need it.

The final math

Data security and privacy is complicated and has traditionally been a hefty and unavoidable expense for companies. Strike Graph changes that equation.

Equally efficient for security novices and experts, Strike Graph gives you tools to speed your compliance process, cut out expensive vendors, destress security questionnaire completion and ensure you’re getting the maximum ROI out of your security program. 

See what that looked like in the real world for DocuPhase. Hint: They reached compliance 50% faster. When you’re ready to get started, open a free launch account here or sign up for a test-drive with one of our security compliance experts.