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VIDEO

Project Managers: Cybersecurity’s Unsung Heroes

Category: Service Provider / MSSP, Thought Leadership

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Transcript

Welcome to another Episode A Cup of Joe Espresso Shop, a small yet highly caffeinated shot full of tips and tricks to make your business run smoothly and keep your employees happy. Now, today I want to speak in praise of project managers and how PlexTrac can make their lives better.

Our social media guy takes a great deal of pleasure in pointing out that I’m a seasoned veteran, a career pentester with many years of hacking underneath my belt. I’d like to think it’s because my years of experience have created more than just an epic mustache, but I really think he just likes giving me a rational. You know what? It’s true. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’ve had the honor of helping secure some of the largest card processors, retailers and telecommunications companies on the planet. But I haven’t done it alone. I mean, I’ve been blessed to be part of some amazing teams. And on all of them, the members that stand out, as invaluable, have always been the operations team, the project managers.

These unsung heroes keep all aspects of the engagement together, from setting expectations from the beginning to ensuring the safe collection of evidence at the end. You want to make friends with your PMS, express your gratitude when things go right, and look for ways to improve things when they go wrong. They do much more than just shift spreadsheets around and work in the calendar. For starters, your PMS can and should play a vital role in your sales process. Now, before anybody freaks out and says, I don’t sell, I don’t want to be in sales, let me assure you, you’re already in sales. Any time you interact with a client you’re selling, your interactions can make or break a client relationship. That’s all that sales really is at the end of the day, a relationship.

Our operations team can make us so much more proactive. I mean, they can head off any issues and are often the first to know about new opportunities. They can spearhead the renewal calls from a more casual and comfortable position. I mean, a renewal is just another task. You’re not actually asking for the sale here. Now, the PlexTrac platform can give our project managers a centralized place to operate from. They can use the client module to build details about the client or the engagement.

They can leverage the assessment module to build questionnaires and scoping templates, rules of engagement, or anything that needs to be tracked. The reports can be managed in real time with QA and peer review performed as the report is being written. Now, this is less time being scheduled and managed and massaged through the process. And when it comes to delivering the final report, it can be exported to Word or PDF like any other traditional reporting tool. Or they can deliver the report entirely online using the readout capabilities coupled with the attack chain module. Heck, they could even use a hybrid approach to delivering and tweaking the report entirely online until everyone is happy with the final result, without having to worry about insecurely transferring files back and forth. So let this be my public announcement in praise of our project managers, without whom we cannot be as successful.

And that’s all the time we have today. My name is Joe Perini, and I am PlexTrac’s product evangelist wishing you happy, project managing.