TechDemocracy Intellicta

Short Summary

Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) systems are common, but many organizations still implement security and GRC in isolated silos aligned to existing structures, limiting their ability to achieve proactive, enterprise-wide cyber resilience. “Cyber Risk Governance” is presented as a holistic approach that aligns information from security solutions and the broader IT infrastructure with standards, frameworks, best practices, and company-specific guidelines to create a unified method for defining, measuring, and communicating cyber risk. Standardized risk communication is positioned as essential for aligning stakeholders and enabling consistent, sustainable decision-making based on deep visibility into security posture. Risk Assurance is highlighted as a key component, ensuring organizational goals drive business actions and that IT executes well-defined business processes, supported by a standards-based platform that unifies business needs, security guidelines, and resilience objectives.

TechDemocracy offers consulting, managed services, and implementation services across IAM, data security, business process management, and business intelligence, and co-founded the Alliance for Cyber Risk Governance (ACRG) to standardize risk measurement and reporting across vendors and silos. Its Cyber Risk Governance Services Framework defines two dimensions: four Centers of Excellence (Strategic Advisory/Informed, Cyber Security Technology/Secured, Cyber Risk Governance/Governed, Audit and Assurance/Resilient) and six security “objects” (Entity, Device, Network, Application, Data, Platform), yielding 24 functional areas with tailored reporting and interaction. The cloud-based Intellicta platform operationalizes continuous compliance and risk analytics via a Risk Assurance Center, real-time data consolidation, configurable dashboards, an algorithmic risk estimator, issue tracking with workflows, RBAC-aligned roles, modular architecture, broad integrations, PII protection via tagging and hashing, and AWS security monitoring integrated into its assurance model. Strengths include holistic, cross-technology governance and rapid insight via dashboards; challenges include framework adoption requirements, limited non-AWS cloud coverage (Azure planned), and uneven global services presence.

Interesting Facts

• TechDemocracy was founded in 2000 and is headquartered in Edison, New Jersey, United States.
• TechDemocracy provides consulting, managed services, and implementation services.
• TechDemocracy is a co-founding member and active contributor to the Alliance for Cyber Risk Governance (ACRG), a not-for-profit industry association.
• ACRG includes members such as BeyondTrust, Rackspace, Rapid7, and LogRhythm.
• The framework defines four Centers of Excellence: Informed, Secured, Governed, and Resilient.
• The framework defines six object domains: Entity, Device, Network, Application, Data, and Platform.
• The framework produces 24 functional areas from combining four COEs with six objects.
• The Intellicta Risk Assurance Center is a web-based, portal-like application.
• Intellicta includes an algorithm-based Risk Calculator/Risk Estimator that assesses risk dimensions including financial risk, criticality, and potential liability from breaches.
• Intellicta 1.3 integrates AWS infrastructure monitoring into the Intellicta Risk Assurance Model across multiple AWS security dimensions.

Notable Quotes

• “A standard way of defining, measuring and communicating cyber risk is a must to achieve adequate communication towards all relevant stakeholders.”
• “Risk Assurance is an important element for implementing such an enterprise-wide governance program.”
• “Existing governance software platforms often create individual data siloes.”
• “Gaps between them need to be bridged to solve the key challenge of combining available information into one holistic and adequately structured view.”
• “TechDemocracy applies the concept of situational awareness (SA) to risk governance for appropriate risk modeling.”
• “The main access point to the complementary TechDemocracy platform is the Intellicta Risk Assurance Center (RAC).”
• “This is achieved by collecting, consolidating and assessing real-time data from existing solution.”
• “Every Breachability context (and thus non-compliance of a control) can be associated with a financial loss penalty index.”
• “TechDemocracy Intellicta is a representative of a highly ambitious and innovative new software category.”
• “Customers need to at least partially follow/adapt the approach specified in the underlying framework definitions.”