The Cyber-Why Company

How did Avertro come about?

Michael Jordan is one of my childhood heroes, and we share a drive to make things happen.

When I was the CTO for McAfee Asia Pacific, my conversations with leaders revolved around the key challenges they were facing. The one common thread was the disconnect between the cyber team and everyone else, particularly with the executive layer.

Organisations continue to struggle with aligning the tracks. The promise of GRC (Governance, Risk and Compliance) technology was to address this.

The reality is you still need spreadsheets and consultants. Armed with my frustration, I felt compelled to create a platform, and make it happen by starting Avertro, the cyber-why company.

What problem are we solving?

Cyber leaders, executives and board members struggle to make data-driven business decisions to manage cyber risk. The old ways are manual, subjective, inefficient, expensive and require multiple technologies, most of which are not fit-for-purpose.

The Avertro platform automates, streamlines, and bridges the gap between the technical and business aspects, codifying the relationships between data points, producing the right metrics to make defensible, data-driven decisions to right-size spend and proves organisations are doing cyber right.

Why are we different?

We have deliberately focused on the cybersecurity use case, and we understand the root cause of the problem that no other company has managed to replicate. This conclusion is based on validated feedback from the industry and our customers. We have a proprietary, codified, scientifically defensible methodology and set of algorithms that we developed based on our R&D efforts and are continually and iteratively improving on them as we ingest more data.

What do we stand for?

We believe that everyone should be empowered to understand their cyber-why, so they can make informed choices about their cyber safety. We elevate the cyber game by bringing science to cyber storytelling, focusing on the business representation of cybersecurity, and building a permanent bridge to translate and normalise cybersecurity for everyone else.

Our ultimate goal is to reduce the impact of cybercrime on society by maximising organisations’ cyber resilience.

The cybersecurity industry must be able to explain our cyber resilience position to executives and articulate how we will get to risk tolerance levels. Forecast how the outcomes we want to achieve will look like. Right size our budgets by aligning spend with benefits. And validate initiatives to ensure our strategies are defensible. So we can optimise our use of external assistance and prove we are doing cyber right.

We can do better than the GRC and spreadsheet status quo. Elevating our game requires focusing on the business representation of cyber and building that permanent bridge to translate and normalise cybersecurity for everyone else.

Who are we working with?

Our first customer was CPA Australia. They have continued to support us because of the immense value they have derived from working with us.

We are also helping large insurance companies, health solutions providers, telecommunications companies, advisory and consulting firms, global manufacturers, retailers, agribusinesses, higher education, mining companies, superannuation funds, technology scale-ups, and government departments.

Our future plans?

We have recently been accepted into the NSW government’s Going Global program, which aims to accelerate our expansion into the Asian market, starting with Singapore. We are also exploring go-to-market approaches for our US and European expansion, likely to occur in 2022.

We have other initiatives that we’re working on right now. Stay tuned and follow our social media accounts for regular updates.