ISMS Software: How to Find the Right Solution for Your Needs
In today's world of digitally permeated processes, a reliable information security management system (ISMS) is essential for protecting your sensitive data. But with the industry growing, how do you find the right ISMS software that is tailored to your specific requirements?
In this blog post, we present the ten crucial features that will help you identify the right solution and adapt your ISMS to modern opportunities and threats.
Read this blog post for valuable insights and practical tips.
10 features to improve your ISMS tool
An effective information security management system (ISMS) is more than just a collection of policies and procedures—it is a dynamic tool that can be continuously improved.
In this section, we present ten outstanding features that will make your ISMS not only more efficient, but also more adaptable and user-friendly. These features will help you proactively manage security risks, ensure compliance, and foster team collaboration. Discover how the right tools can help you optimize your ISMS and take your security strategy to the next level.
You can find an overview of all the features of Athereon GRC on our All Features page.
1) Compliance management
Many organizations strive to comply with multiple standards and frameworks. Keeping track of the respective maturity levels and potential overlaps can be challenging, quickly leading to unnecessary extra work and inefficient workflows.
A modular and editorially prepared standards management system like Athereon GRC saves users time and ensures transparency. Implementation at the specific requirements level can be documented and operationalized for the exact scope, down to each individual business process. With Athereon GRC's unique standard mapping and accompanying wizard, you can sequentially process multiple controls from different standards and standard generations while maintaining a structured overview. This allows you to automatically comply with congruent standards or updated frameworks and provides insight into your current maturity level at any time.
2) Automated workflows
A major challenge in implementing and managing an information security management system is formalizing the necessary steps to provide evidence of the functionality and integrity of the processes during internal reviews or external audits.
Athereon GRC offers numerous automated workflow features to help you formalize and document completed tasks. These include automatic reminders and documentation of work steps, easy assignment to responsible parties in just a few clicks, and automatic operationalization that independently triggers actions and tasks.
3) Neat cockpit
When using multiple GRC software programs or different compliance modules, comprehensibility and transparency of processes within your organization decrease as complexity increases. Finding methods tailored to individual requirements turn into a challenge.
Athereon GRC's integrated cockpit offers a complete overview in real time, intuitive operation and customizable interfaces that you can design to suit your individual GRC requirements.
4) Comprehensive assets
Assets are a common unit in all ISMS tools, allowing you to define your organization's values. However, additional software is often required to represent a complex metamodel.
With Athereon GRC, you can manage the dependencies of your assets across all features, determine protection requirements, and thus map your entire organization. The internally developed, central metamodel and the comprehensive API create innovative synergies for greater efficiency and transparency. Numerous applications already established within your organization can therefore be easily integrated into Athereon GRC and continue to be used.
5) Risk management lifecycle
Without a dedicated risk management lifecycle, risks and costs may be misjudged or unrealistic, especially across different time frames. This can sometimes lead to serious consequences for the entire organization.
With Athereon GRC, you can digitally map all phases of your risk management. Risks go through various phases that correspond to the processing stages in common risk management standards. In each phase, individual risk characteristics can be adjusted, and responsibilities appropriate to the phase can be defined. From identification and assessment to treatment, approval of measures, and monitoring. Risk owners and approvers remain efficiently informed throughout the entire process via automatic notifications.
6) Reporting and dashboards
Many ISMS frameworks include time-critical processes and incident reporting obligations. Manually creating reports is often time-consuming and carries the risk of non-compliance with reporting obligations due to delayed or incomplete documentation.
Athereon GRC's reporting function not only automatically generates the required reports for regulatory authorities to efficiently comply with reporting obligations, but also supports you in creating comprehensive reports for management, auditors, and stakeholders. The dashboards provide real-time insights and historical changes for developing these reports, allowing you to manage and process all relevant data in one central location.
7) AI
Especially when dealing with high volumes of data and time-critical processes, it would be a mistake not to leverage the advantages of artificial intelligence. Many providers already integrate AI, but these assistants often come from third parties. It's crucial to consider whether assistants like Microsoft Co-Pilot or OpenAI's ChatGPT meet your specific requirements, as they often send data to international servers, potentially raising data privacy concerns.
Athereon GRC's generative AI can assist you in complying with requirements, automating workflows, identifying risks, and helping to formulate policies. With a single click, this customizable and integrated AI provides greater clarity on dependencies, pending tasks, audit management, and standard requirements. Athereon AI uses a proprietary Large Language Model (LLM) hosted and operated on our German servers. This ensures your data remains secure and never leaves our servers.
8) User community
Connecting with other successful users can offer numerous advantages for compliance professionals. Within the community, you can exchange ideas and develop innovations tailored to your specific needs, because nobody understands the individual requirements of software better than those who use it every day.
At Athereon GRC, we not only welcome but actively support the lively exchange within our user community. The dedicated participation of our customers has frequently and significantly influenced our roadmap, leading to the development of new features that users have expressed a strong desire for. Athereon GRC cultivates its vibrant and organically growing community, where you can share ideas and experiences with the latest features in everyday situations and at events. Be the first to learn about planned and implemented updates, get answers to your questions, and continuously develop your GRC landscape.
9) Made in Germany
Data is our most valuable currency today. Virtually every organization manages data for which it is responsible for protecting, whether it be company-specific information or sensitive customer data. The awareness that different countries interpret and legally define adequate data protection differently is also widespread today, leading many German organizations to place the most trust in German providers when it comes to data security. This is also suggested by a representative survey from 2023 conducted by the digital association Bitkom.
Even if the ISMS software comes from German providers, it may be hosted on servers abroad. User rights may not be GDPR-compliant in such cases. The physical location of the server is not verifiable by third parties. Therefore, your data is most secure if you contractually guarantee the servers' country of origin hosting your ISMS software.
Athereon GRC was developed in Germany and is hosted exclusively on German servers. This prevents your data from being shared with third parties and ensures that our German-speaking experts are always available to answer any questions you may have about our product – all “made in Germany”.
10) Cloud-native
Traditional software that doesn't utilize the cloud is often too rigid for today's demands for reliable tools. Therefore, it's advantageous to choose cloud-native software for your ISMS, as these are fast and, above all, fail-safe.
These strengths are also found in Athereon GRC. Thanks to rapid release cycles, users receive regular updates with the latest technologies – without long waiting times. Our solutions can be implemented quickly ("turnkey ready", so to speak), which makes getting started significantly easier. With Athereon GRC, you can also react to future regulatory changes in record time or adapt workflows to industry best practices.
Because Athereon GRC is entirely developed and deployed in Germany, a high level of data security and compliance is guaranteed. Features like single sign-on ensure user-friendly and secure login, while the entire architecture of our software is designed with security in mind. This allows your organization to benefit from a modern, flexible, and secure solution that adapts perfectly to your needs.
Conclusion: An important decision for your security goals
In summary, choosing the right ISMS software is crucial for the success of your information security strategy. The ten features presented in this article provide valuable guidance for comparing the best providers and finding the solution that perfectly suits your organization's needs.
With Athereon GRC, you benefit from first-class software that combines all these features and helps you efficiently achieve your security goals. Our team is ready to provide you with personalized advice and work with you to find the optimal solution for your security requirements.
Feel free to contact us.
