Brink is a new cloud-native high-performance connectivity and security service. Brink enables higher productivity through a lightning-fast, in-office experience delivered to the modern hybrid workforce anywhere. Today’s mobile and remote workforce is challenged by using applications hosted across multiple clouds and private data centers, with fragmented security. Cloudbrink’s HAaaS helps address all these challenges.
Akitra provided its customer Cloudbrink with an automated monitoring and compliance solution to achieve SOC 2 certification within just a few weeks – and remain continuously compliant into the future. Using Akitra’s ISO 27001 module, Cloudbrink also completed ISO 27001 compliance certification in parallel.
Cloudbrink was facing requirements from large global enterprise customers to comply with SOC 2 and ISO 27001.
“Having taken previous companies through the compliance process, I knew that the manual compliance process is demanding,” said Subbu Ponnuswamy. “First, it requires lots of time and effort: finding templates, tracking down evidence, hiring consultants, etc. Second, it can be confusing what to do and when to do it. It’s hard to interpret the framework’s requirements about what you need to do. And that multiplies when you’re faced with having to comply with several frameworks.”
After looking at alternatives, Cloudbrink chose Akitra for four key reasons:
1. Cloudbrink is a multi-cloud solution (AWS, GCP, Azure, Digital Ocean, and others), and Akitra supports integration with all of them.
2. The company needed certification under multiple frameworks – SOC 2, ISO 27001, and later may need HIPAA and PCI DSS – all of which Akitra’s platform also supports today.
3. The maturity of Akitra’s solution, along with the company’s depth of expertise in compliance and security, gave Cloudbrink confidence about being in good hands – and able to get expert help whenever needed.
4- Affordability
Akitra’s complete set of customizable policies was a tremendous benefit. “It really streamlined the whole process for us by giving us templates that we could tailor to our specific needs,” Subbu emphasized. “Some of our customers insist on seeing the policies themselves, so we were not just aiming at compliance for its own sake. The policies had to be right.”
Akitra offers support for multiple cloud platforms, including all those currently used by Cloudbrink. In total, Akitra supports close to 100 cloud platforms and services, with the ability to monitor all of them while automatically collecting evidence for audit. Another essential capability for Cloudbrink was managing employee onboarding and off-boarding by tracking policy acknowledgment and training. Using Akitra’s portal to allow employees to sign in and record training completion and policy sign-off was easy and provided the necessary evidence required for compliance. As for the external audit process itself, Subbu said the auditor tools in Akitra’s platform made the process so easy that he gratefully admitted, “I didn’t really have to do anything to help the auditors – the auditor portal was self-service. There was none of the usual back-and-forth required – the evidence was all there for them.”
Cloudbrink had its SOC 2 attestation report in hand within weeks of starting the process, while also completing ISO 27001 certification. “Time is money.” Said Subbu, “We would have spent far more time on becoming compliant if we hadn’t had Akitra’s compliance automation platform.” He added that the company is adding more new customers now that Cloudbrink can prove SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance, with many more prospects in the pipeline.
“Our compliance experience with Akitra validated our reasons for choosing them in the first place. We expect to be working with them as our compliance automation partner for a long time to come as we expand our global footprint”, concluded Subbu.
