American Frontier: A Holistic Look At Risk Mitigation

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American Frontier

James Evans, President, American FrontierJames Evans, President
How do we reduce business risks in a post-pandemic world? Nearly every company is trying to find an answer to this question amid pandemic-induced geopolitical tensions and global supply chain bottlenecks. While mitigating business risk, companies often fail to consider multiple risk factors outside the confines of their cyberspace. As a result, they are left unprepared for financial uncertainties, strategic oversights, legal liabilities, compliance risk, or asset damage caused by natural disasters that lead to business loss.

American Frontier is lending a much-needed helping hand to organizations with its leading-edge solution and services in the world of governance, risk and compliance management.

"We Don’t Offer One-Size-Fits-All Packages. Instead, We Tailor Solutions To Our Client’s Business Needs, Cybersecurity Risks, And Budgets. The Result Is An Easily Budgeted, Fixed Monthly Cost"

Their exclusive suite of solutions allows companies to secure valuable organizational assets against every kind of business risk while complying with all regulatory requirements.

Generally, for prioritized cyber risk mitigation, companies tend to allocate the task to their IT department. Executives often mistakenly consider cyber risk to be a purely technical issue, but cyber risk is business risk. An IT team is not entirely equipped to know all the nitty-gritty of business risks or even aware of all the contractual obligations between the company and its vendors, clients, and regulators. Companies often choose to hire a Chief Information Security Officer, or CISO, to detect and mitigate any threat to their IT assets. But what they often forget is that more than a CISO, they need a Chief Security Officer (CSO) who can provide oversight for the entire organization’s security, not just IT.

American Frontier has integrated the role of a CSO into its state-of-the-art Virtual Chief Security Officer (vCSO) program, where its team of risk management experts acts as an extension of the organization’s management team. This provides the benefits of highly specialized security talent for a fraction of the cost of full-time staff. Analyzing all the risk areas associated with a client’s business, American Frontier offers tailor-made risk management solutions, security and compliance assessments, managed security services, advanced project implementation, and general IT system support.

Upon kick starting a vCSO engagement, American Frontier begins with a comprehensive risk assessment. It involves a company’s executive team in its vCSO program to take stock of critical gaps in their IT infrastructure, business processes, agreements, and compliance requirements. Based on the findings, American Frontier helps the team formulate risk mitigation strategies, controls, policies, and procedures in alignment with their organizational goals.

“Our vCSO program is designed to help a company’s management team resolve GRC issues associated with their business and secure high business valuations,” says James Evans, President of American Frontier.

Setting New Benchmarks in Risk Management

Rapidly evolving security standards and regulations by the SEC to increase cybersecurity awareness at the board level have made organizations more motivated to stay up-to-date with the latest guidelines.

Executives eyeing private equity partnerships and exit strategies want their companies to be on solid footing with these new requirements. American Frontier’s vCSO program includes presentations to communicate business security risk, project status, and outcomes to the board, fulfilling these requirements.

There are also instances when a company wants to level up its internal policies to prepare for growth or other factors. American Frontier’s vCSO program enables organizations to make sound security decisions, identify and understand probable threats, and mitigate those threats through optimized security processes.

Our vCSO Program Is Designed To Help A Company’s Management Team Resolve GRC Issues Associated With Their Business And Secure High Business Valuations

As a virtual member of the team, American Frontier holds regular meetings with executive leadership to provide information about newly identified business risks, security trends, and project status, while gaining an understanding of other motivating factors and business priorities. This provides context to the entire team and allows prioritization of security projects and budgets.

A core component of any GRC program is documentation, and the vCSO program is no exception. Supporting documentation is provided to demonstrate compliance with the program, as well as any regulatory compliance requirements. All decisions are recorded, along with supporting documentation and signoffs. Regular reviews of existing systems, policies, procedures, controls, contracts, and vendors are performed and documented. Internal risk assessments as well as third-party assessments, vulnerability scans, and penetration tests are memorialized as well.

On multiple occasions, companies do not have an immediate need to build a regulatory compliance framework. In some industries, there simply is very little regulatory pressure. But as a company dedicated to preventing problems before they happen, American Frontier encourages its clients to adopt a pre-emptive approach to risk reduction, recommending and implementing a well-understood framework appropriate for the client.

"Adopting a well-respected and understood framework to guide decisions on policies and controls makes those decisions defensible. Any argument that attempts to challenge the validity of those decisions can be quickly nullified by referencing the framework,” says Evans.

Leveraging its vCSO program and the associated risk assessments, American Frontier also assists the executive team with understanding the organization’s contracts with its clients, vendors, partners, shareholders, and employees.

“Every contractual obligation is a source of risk. If we can build a control around it, and tools to monitor and document the control, the risk can be mitigated,” says Evans.

The Distinct Touch of Personalization

Forever on a mission to improve business operations rather than selling technology stacks, American Frontier offers personalized support to its clients while implementing a vCSO program. Program deliverables are customizable to fit specific client needs. Rather than making a client procure loads of tech tools, it helps them find the right ones through vCSO, while essential services, such as third-party vulnerability scanning and penetration testing, are already included in the program. The team of engineers behind American Frontier’s vCSO are vastly experienced and always takes a comprehensive view of risk management to assess all the risk areas within a business.

“We don’t offer one-size-fits-all packages. Instead, we tailor solutions to our client’s business needs, cybersecurity risks, and budgets. The result is an easily budgeted, fixed monthly cost,” states Evans.

Building on Success

Among the numerous success stories that make American Frontier one of the leaders in the risk management space is its help in building a client’s data center to overcome risks associated with facility failures.

The client’s engineering team was looking for a tech refresh as some of their existing infrastructure was aging out. The engineers were mired in debates over technical details, but when the organization consulted American Frontier, it was assessed that this wasn’t a technical problem, but a governance problem. An in-depth discussion with the company’s executive leadership, including board members, revealed that the wrong questions were being asked. The board’s primary concern was growth, and specifically, having both the capacity to scale while eliminating the risk of downtime that could impact sales. What began as a simple tech refresh shifted to the build-out of a second datacenter, and migration to a Dell EMC VxRail solution; a hyper-converged infrastructure with a stretched cluster between the two data centers. Following the installation of this advanced infrastructure, the management team had successfully mitigated the risks associated with both scalability and facility failures with a technical solution that aligned with growth goals. American Frontier also handled the procurement, build-out, installation and configuration of the solution.

After resolving GRC issues over the years, American Frontier wants to keep enhancing the features and functionalities of its leading-edge vCSO program to help companies formalize all GRC requirements in one place and reduce risks.

Continuing on the path of evolution, American Frontier is currently bringing to market compliance-as-a-service (CaaS) on top of its existing service suite. For companies planning to adhere to the guidelines laid out by CMMC, CIS, NIST, ISO, SOC2, PCI, HIPAA, and/or various regulatory agencies, American Frontier is ready to act as the go-to company that understands these requirements and provides the necessary technological or advisory support to keep organizations secure and valuable at all times.

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