As long-time veterans of the enterprise software business, the co-founders of ConverSight were fully aware of the critical importance of compliance. When the time came to seek SOC 1 and SOC 2 certifications, they knew that manual compliance processes would be hopelessly deficient compared to automated compliance platforms.
“Manual compliance makes it painful to collect the data and assemble it for audit. With a fast-growing software business to run, we were all busy and resource-constrained. So we went looking for a vendor like Akitra, with an automated solution,” said CTO Gopinath Jaganmohan.
One of the critical areas in which ConverSight sought help from Akitra was in documenting policies, particularly for security. Since Akitra provides customizable templates for this, ConverSight’s compliance team was able to make rapid progress with SOC 2 readiness. And because of the use of common controls, completing the SOC 1 process was also speedy, requiring only one additional month’s time.
Also, “We benefited tremendously from Akitra’s integrations with all the cloud services we use,” said Gopinath. “Automated data collection from those services was
invaluable. And anytime we needed guidance, Akitra’s customer success team was always right there.”
ConverSight has been garnering much greater market attention with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has put the spotlight on the benefits of conversational AI. Since this is one of the features of ConverSight’s platform, prospective customers have sought out the company’s analytics solution. And of course, these customers insist on compliance with frameworks such as SOC 1 and SOC 2.
“Having these compliances in hand means that we can breeze through the vendor evaluation process with new customers far more quickly, even with the most demanding enterprises,” explained Gopinath.
Conversight’s ROI from partnering with Akitra was unexpectedly large. Gopinath explained that the company gained their ROI from four benefits provided by Akitra’s compliance solution. First, the discipline of undergoing the certification journey raised the bar of security within ConverSight.
Second, savings on headcount alone provided an ROI of 200%. Third, Akitra’s automation drastically shortened Conver-Sight’s timeline to secure compliance attestations from the auditor. Lastly, ConverSight’s team has now gained much more expertise in compliance, including how to maintain continuous compliance.