(From SC Media. ©2024 CyberRisk Alliance, LLC. All rights reserved. Used under license.)

Xacta® was recently named a finalist in the category of Best Compliance Solution in SC Media’s annual SC Awards. 

This respected award program has been around for a long time: SC Media established the program twenty-seven years ago to honor and recognize outstanding innovations, organizations, and leaders advancing the practice of information security.

Xacta has received much recognition throughout its long (over twenty-year) history. We see it as encouragement that we’re continuing to not only head in the right direction in lockstep with a security environment where proactive, forward-thinking (rather than simply reactive) security practices are becoming more widely adopted but also surpass our own expectations when it comes to creating the best possible cyber risk management platform available for both government and industry. 

When Xacta was invented, it was the first of its kind: a web-based application designed to automate the most labor-intensive and time-consuming aspects of the Certification and Accreditation (C&A) process. 

However, for Xacta, this was just the beginning. Soon, the team behind Xacta introduced a new capability to automate the continual assessment phase of the C&A process. If you’re not familiar with that term, it’s because it’s known today as continuous monitoring. (As a side note, in this year’s Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Cyber Risk Management, Telos® is listed in the “Continuous Controls Monitoring” category or CCM.) 

In the years that followed, we have continued to build and modify Xacta to not only meet but exceed what has, over the years, proven to be increasingly rigorous and complex security requirements. 

From the beginning, Xacta was created to simplify and streamline the day-to-day work of IT and cyber risk so that risk and compliance teams can gain a holistic view of security across their organization and make proactive, informed decisions.

That original vision continues to guide the direction of Xacta, as the team behind Xacta is continually improving the platform. 

While the Xacta of today shares a common DNA with the original version we created and deployed all those years ago, it’s also much more advanced. Over the years, the team behind Xacta has evolved the platform to make it as user-friendly as possible; as a result, complex tasks are now easier to execute than ever. Also, with the addition of customizable data visualization widgets and reports to highlight critical information, users have valuable, at-a-glance access to critical risk metrics on which to take action. Finally, the Xacta of today is not only able to streamline increasingly complex security frameworks such as the NIST RMF but also support an organization’s GRC initiatives, generate complex reports and dashboards, and much more.

Today, Xacta is more flexible and customizable—and powerful—than ever before, which makes it perfectly suited as the ideal cyber risk management platform for enterprise security intelligence.

SC Media’s summary of Xacta for this award states: 

Xacta’s customer base remains robust, with growing demand for its cyber risk management solutions, especially in mission-critical environments. As the security threat landscape evolves, Telos has successfully secured renewals and new contracts for Xacta with major government and commercial organizations.

I’m particularly proud of the customers we continue to serve today, as they are a significant part of the narrative behind Xacta’s broad appeal. As the discipline of cybersecurity has matured, Xacta has expanded to meet customer demands and has been developed to include a broad set of capabilities to meet demands across the spectrum of IT risk and compliance. Our current diverse customer base across both the public and private sectors represents Xacta’s flexibility and responsiveness, as well as its broad applicability to a vast range of IT risk and compliance scenarios. 

For example, Xacta is not only used by government organizations to streamline and automate complex frameworks like the NIST Risk Management Framework, the Australia ISM, the New Zealand ISM, the NIST CSF, and more; it is also used by cloud service providers to streamline gathering and managing security-related data for FedRAMP authorization and—once that authorization has been granted—continuous monitoring of their overall compliance posture to maintain their FedRAMP authorization over time.

Here at Telos, Xacta is also the backbone of our extensive risk assessment services. We’ve served Fortune 500 companies, federal and defense agencies, and the intelligence community with capabilities for assessing and evaluating their systems in advance of audits and testing for security authorization.

Finally, I would like to say that I feel this recognition is a testament not only to the extraordinary vision and dedication of the team behind Xacta but also to the day-to-day IT risk management and security compliance work of our customers, some of which rank among the most security-conscious organizations in the world. Over the years, their input and feedback have helped make Xacta the uniquely powerful and capable platform for managing IT risk and security compliance that it is today. I’m excited to see how their continued feedback helps shape the direction of Xacta as we continue to develop the platform to meet and anticipate IT risk management and security compliance challenges within an increasingly complex technological world. 

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark and HYPE CYCLE is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner Reports: Gartner, Hype Cycle for Cyber-Risk Management, 2024, Michael Kranawetter, Jie Zhang, Pedro Pablo Perea de Duenas, July 22, 2024

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