Startups

This company wants to get every employee involved in keeping data safe

Ostendio's platform provides companies with a picture of how they're doing with cybersecurity and compliance. That involves all employees.

The three founders of Ostendio. (Courtesy photo)

With the ever-present threat of breaches, keeping data safe isn’t only the job of the CISOs. That’s why Ostendio seeks to extend cybersecurity to all employees.

The Arlington, Va.–based company’s MyVCM platform provides companies with a central place to manage cybersecurity. For industries which also must be in line with federal standards in areas like privacy or specific security frameworks, it also seeks to provide a simpler way to approach compliance. As CEO Grant Elliott has written, Ostendio started by working with health-focused companies, which makes sense given that he had prior experience in health IT, and the fact that the industry is heavily regulated.

The goal of the platform is to provide an overall look at a company’s security. To get a full picture, the company can’t just look at a random sampling of employees.

“The information we’re tracking comes from every single employee within the organization,” said Elliott.

And the platform shows each of those employees how effective they are in contributing to the security of the company, rather than giving a report to one higher-up.

“We use data and analytics to score each individual and to score their interactions with the company, so we can show them where they are average, above average, top five percent, top thirty five percent,” Elliott said.

The goal is to help all employees be a part of keeping the organization secure.

“When people feel really invested in the process, they really want to be a part of that front line, and that really gives employers a better chance, using their employees as their front line of defense,” Elliott said.

Reflecting that the data goes beyond internal benefits. The platform also has a network that allows digital health companies and health systems to securely share compliance data with each other.

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