The threat your controls were never designed to see

There is a fraud technique spreading rapidly across every sector that has nothing to do with malware, phishing links, or compromised credentials. It does not trigger your SIEM. It bypasses your email gateway. It has no payload for your endpoint agent to detect. And in 40%+ of organisations that have experienced it, it has succeeded.

The technique is AI-powered deepfake executive impersonation. Understanding how it works, why it works, and what actually stops it is one of the most important things a security, finance leader or board member can do right now.

How the attack landscape has changed

Executive impersonation is not new. Fraudsters have long posed as C-Level executives in emails, invoking urgency and authority to push through unauthorised payments. What has changed, fundamentally and recently, is the cost and complexity of doing it convincingly.

Until very recently, cloning a voice or generating a synthetic video required significant technical expertise, specialist equipment, and considerable time. It was a capability largely confined to well-resourced criminal groups and nation-state actors. That barrier has gone.

Today, generative AI tools that can clone a voice from a few minutes of audio are freely available online. The same technology that powers legitimate productivity tools including voice synthesis, video generation, and natural language models, is being repurposed by fraudsters who need no technical expertise to use them. The result is a 1,500% increase in deepfake attacks since 2023 (UK Gov 2025 Study), and an average financial impact of a successful attack being estimated to be over £210,000.

The democratisation of this capability is the critical shift. Attacks that previously required sophisticated criminal infrastructure can now be launched by individuals. The volume of attempts is increasing not because more sophisticated actors have emerged, but because the barrier to entry has effectively collapsed.

Why human judgement is the target and why that is hard to defend

To understand why this threat is so difficult to defend against, it helps to understand what it is actually attacking.

Most organisational fraud controls assume that the weakest link is the technology, that if you can secure the perimeter, filter the email, and lock down the endpoint, you have addressed the risk. Deepfake impersonation attacks do not target the technology. They target the trust that people place in the voices and faces of their colleagues and leaders.

Consider the typical high-value payment authorisation process. A finance director receives a call from someone who sounds exactly like the CEO, requesting an urgent transfer ahead of a deal closing. The voice, the tone, the vocabulary, and the sense of urgency are all consistent with the genuine article. The finance director has no reason to doubt what they are hearing, and every reason to act quickly.

The verification mechanism in that scenario is human judgement. And human judgement is precisely what AI-powered impersonation is engineered to defeat.

This is not a failure of intelligence or awareness on the part of the individual. It is a structural vulnerability in how organisations communicate and authorise actions, one that has existed for years but that has only recently become practically exploitable at scale.

The exposure organisations are not measuring

One of the most significant and underappreciated aspects of this threat is how much publicly available material already exists that could be used to construct a convincing impersonation.

For most organisations with any public profile, and for most executives who are active in their industry, the raw material needed to train an impersonation model is already out there. LinkedIn videos, Keynote recordings, Investor calls, Press interviews, Webinars, Podcast appearances. Every piece of public audio and video content featuring a senior leader is, from an attacker’s perspective, training data.

Most organisations have no idea how extensive that exposure is. They have never mapped it, or quantified it, and therefore cannot make informed decisions about how to manage it. The exposure assessment, understanding what is publicly accessible and what risk it creates, is the first and most important step in addressing this threat, because it moves the organisation from assumption to evidence.

Why existing controls have a structural blind spot

It is worth being direct about why conventional security investments do not address this risk, not as a criticism of those investments, but because understanding the gap is necessary to filling it.

Email security controls are designed to analyse digital artefacts: headers, links, attachments, sender reputation. A deepfake attack that arrives as a phone call or a WhatsApp voice note has none of these characteristics. There is nothing to scan.

SIEM and endpoint detection tools look for anomalous system behaviour, indicators of compromise, and known attack signatures. A fraudulent phone call does not generate system events. There is no log entry to correlate.

DLP tools monitor data moving across systems. A payment authorised verbally following a fraudulent instruction does not cross a data loss boundary the tool was designed to detect.

This is not a technology problem that more technology will solve, at least not primarily. The attack surface here is the communication channel and the human trust it carries, and the defence requires interventions that operate at that level.

What effective defence actually looks like

Understanding this threat clearly points toward what effective defence requires. From our experience at Cyberfort there are four interconnected components which need to be in place to defend against a deepfake attack:

Exposure mapping. Before any organisation can make informed decisions about its risk, it needs to understand what material already exists publicly and which individuals carry the greatest impersonation risk. A structured exposure review produces that picture and identifies where reduction is possible.

Risk assessment. Not all scenarios carry equal risk. The combination of who could be impersonated, which communication channels are most vulnerable, and which teams are most likely to act on impersonated instructions creates a specific risk profile that varies by organisation. Understanding that profile lets you prioritise your response.

Scenario-based testing. Awareness training that tells people deepfakes exist is not sufficient preparation. What prepares people is working through realistic simulations: hearing what a cloned voice actually sounds like, experiencing the psychology of an authority-and-urgency scenario, and practising the verification instincts needed to slow down and challenge. Organisations that have been through this consistently report it as the single most impactful element of their preparation.

Procedural controls. The most durable defence is embedding out-of-band verification into high-risk processes, making it structurally normal, rather than exceptional, to pause and confirm through a secondary channel before acting on a significant instruction. This does not slow organisations down in practice; it removes the friction that fraudsters rely on.

When this risk becomes particularly acute

While every organisation with any public profile carries some exposure, certain situations materially increase the risk or the consequences of a successful attack.

Executives who are active on LinkedIn, YouTube, or in industry media carry higher impersonation risk simply by virtue of the volume of publicly available material. Organisations going through mergers, acquisitions, or leadership changes create a period of uncertainty and unfamiliar communication patterns that fraudsters actively exploit, staff may be less sure what normal looks like, and more inclined to defer to authority. Publicly listed companies face particular scrutiny because their leadership and financial processes are more visible.

Organisations with large or frequent payment authorisation processes, particularly where those processes involve a small number of decision-makers acting on verbal instruction, carry concentrated exposure. Recent near-misses or suspected fraud attempts are a signal that the organisation may already be on a target list. And insurance renewals and regulatory audits increasingly ask direct questions about this threat, which means the question of whether you have addressed it is coming regardless.

 Five key questions organisations should be asking when it comes to deepfake and execution impersonation attacks

For any security or risk leader thinking through their organisation’s position on this threat, five questions are worth asking:

1. How much publicly available audio and video material exists featuring your senior leaders, and have you ever assessed it as an attack surface?

2. Do your finance, HR, and executive assistant teams have specific, practised protocols for verifying the identity of a caller or video sender before acting on a sensitive instruction?

3. Have your high-risk teams ever experienced a realistic impersonation simulation,  not been told it exists, but actually worked through one

4. Could you articulate to your board, in concrete terms, what your current exposure to this risk is and what controls are in place to manage it?

5. If a successful attack occurred tomorrow, would your incident response procedures cover this scenario?

If the honest answer to any of these is no, or not sure, that is the gap which needs to be addressed through training, policy updates and staff awareness of Deepfake and Executive impersonation attacks.

How quickly do you need to act and what’s involved

One of the useful things about this threat is that addressing it does not require a lengthy programme. The core work – exposure mapping, risk assessment, scenario testing, procedural control design can be completed in a focused engagement that does not consume significant internal resource or disrupt day-to-day operations. The output is a clear picture of exposure, a tested and trained team, and a set of practical controls embedded in process.

So, What does this look like?

As mentioned earlier in the article addressing this threat requires more than awareness. It requires a structured assessment of your actual exposure, a tested understanding of how your people respond under realistic conditions, and practical controls that embed durable resilience.

For example, at Cyberfort we have built a Deepfake & Executive Impersonation Defence service to help organisations prepare themselves against this type of attack effectively.

It begins with an Executive Exposure Review – a systematic mapping of the publicly available material that could be used to impersonate your key individuals. Most organisations are genuinely surprised by what this surfaces. Understanding your exposure is the essential first step.

Step 2 involves a structured Deepfake Risk Assessment that identifies your highest-risk scenarios, communication channels, and roles. Not every part of your organisation carries the same level of risk. Knowing where to focus is what makes the response proportionate and effective.

Step 3 puts your people through realistic Fraud Scenario Testing – AI-powered impersonation simulations that replicate the conditions of a real attack. This is where organisations learn the difference between theoretical awareness and genuine resilience. It is also where the specific gaps in your human controls become visible, in a controlled environment, before an attacker finds them for you.

Step 4 combines targeted AI Awareness Training with the delivery of an Executive Protection Playbook: practical verification protocols, out-of-band confirmation procedures, escalation paths, and governance processes that your teams can use immediately and sustain over time.

The outcome is not just a report. It is an organisation that has moved from unknown exposure to active, measurable resilience, with the board-level evidence of due diligence that regulators, insurers, and investors increasingly expect.

From our experience at Cyberfort, the organisations that are best placed to mitigate the risks against this type of attack are not necessarily the most technologically sophisticated. They are the ones that have looked at this honestly, understood where their exposure lies, and put the right human controls in place. That is an achievable position for any organisation, and it is a significantly better one than discovering the gap through a successful attack.

The attack that starts next door

When security teams map their risks, they tend to focus on what they can see and control: their own infrastructure, endpoints, and perimeter. That instinct is understandable. It is also increasingly misaligned with how the most significant breaches of the last two years have happened.

The pattern is consistent. An organisation with mature security controls, a hardened perimeter, and a well-resourced IT team is compromised, not through their own systems, but through a supplier. A managed service provider with access to their network, a software vendor whose update mechanism became a delivery vehicle for malicious code, a cloud platform partner whose credentials were harvested and used to move laterally into the customer’s environment.

The attacker did not knock on the front door. They walked in through a side entrance that the target organisation had never fully audited, and in many cases, did not even know existed.

This is the defining characteristic of modern supply chain cyber risk. It does not respect the perimeter you have built. It exploits the trust relationships you have extended, often necessarily, often legitimately, to the network of third parties your organisation depends on to function.

The scale of the problem is structural, not incidental

It would be reassuring to treat high-profile supply chain attacks as edge cases: sophisticated operations carried out by well-resourced nation-state actors against strategically significant targets. The data does not support that reassurance.

According to the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report 2025, more than 30% of data breaches now involve a third-party element. Blackberry’s 2024 survey of IT decision-makers found that more than 75% of software supply chains had been exposed to a cyber attack in the preceding twelve months. And the UK Government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025 found that only 14% of organisations had undertaken a formal security review of their supply chain in the last year.

Read those three figures together and the picture becomes clear. Third-party attacks are not rare. They are not declining. And the vast majority of organisations have not formally assessed the risk they carry through their supplier relationships.

This is not primarily a technology problem. It is a governance and visibility problem. Most organisations have grown their supplier base organically over years or decades, extending access and data-sharing relationships as the business required them, without building a proportionate framework for assessing and managing the security posture of those suppliers over time.

The result is a risk landscape that is both significant and largely invisible.

Why traditional approaches fall short

The conventional response to supply chain risk tends to rely on one of two mechanisms: contractual protections, or certification-based assurance. Both have genuine value. Neither is sufficient on its own.

A supplier’s ISO 27001 certificate, or their signed GDPR data processing agreement, tells you about their intent and their documented processes at the point the certificate was issued. It does not tell you about the controls that are actually operating today, in the specific parts of their business that touch your data and your systems. Certification can be narrowly scoped, out of date, or simply not reflective of the real-world security posture of an organisation at a given moment.

Supplier questionnaires suffer from a different but related problem. They are typically completed once, reviewed once, filed, and then largely forgotten, while the risk environment continues to evolve. A supplier that passed your assessment two years ago may have undergone significant organisational change, technology change, or personnel change since then. The questionnaire response that gave you comfort at the time has not been updated to reflect any of it.

The deeper issue is one of volume and capacity. A typical mid-sized organisation has dozens, sometimes hundreds of suppliers with some form of digital access or data-sharing relationship. Applying consistent, meaningful scrutiny to every one of those relationships, at the depth required to form a genuine view of security posture, is not feasible without a structured, risk-prioritised approach that distinguishes between the suppliers that represent real exposure and those that do not.

The five gaps that create real exposure

Through our work with organisations across financial services, professional services, engineering, and critical infrastructure, five specific gaps appear with consistent regularity.

The first is the absence of a consolidated supplier inventory. Most organisations cannot produce, without significant effort, a complete list of which third parties have access to their systems, what level of access they hold, and what data they can reach. That baseline simply does not exist in a structured, maintained form.

The second is the reliance on static risk pictures in a dynamic environment. Supplier relationships change. Personnel change. Technology changes. A risk assessment that does not have a defined refresh cycle is a record of how things were, not how they are.

The third is the gap between contractual assurance and operational reality. Contracts establish obligations. They do not verify compliance. The difference between what a supplier is contractually required to do and what their security controls actually look like in practice can be significant, and that gap is rarely visible without independent assessment.

The fourth is the absence of incident response planning that accounts for supplier failure. Most organisations have internal incident response plans. Far fewer have pre-agreed response playbooks that cover the specific scenario where a supplier is compromised and the organisation needs to contain, investigate, and communicate about that compromise quickly. When a supplier incident occurs, the organisations that respond well are those that had already mapped their exposure in advance.

The fifth is the growing commercial and regulatory pressure that makes this governance gap increasingly visible. Insurers are asking harder questions about third-party risk management as a condition of coverage. Regulated sectors face specific obligations around supply chain oversight. Enterprise customers are requesting evidence of third-party assurance as part of procurement processes. The organisations that cannot answer these questions clearly are finding that the absence of a supply chain risk framework carries direct commercial consequences.

The right approach: structured, risk-prioritised, proportionate

Effective supply chain risk management does not mean applying the same level of scrutiny to every supplier relationship. It means having a clear, defensible basis for understanding which supplier relationships represent the greatest exposure and directing your assurance effort accordingly.

That starts with building and maintaining a structured view of your supplier landscape: who has access, at what level, to what data and systems. It continues with a risk-prioritised approach to assessment that distinguishes between critical suppliers, significant suppliers, and low-risk relationships, and applies proportionate scrutiny to each tier. It is sustained through embedding supply chain security assessment into procurement and vendor management processes so that new relationships are evaluated consistently before access is granted, not retrospectively.

The output of this kind of programme is not just reduced risk. It is the documented evidence of due diligence that regulators, insurers, and enterprise customers are increasingly requiring and that boards need to be able to point to when the question of third-party risk management is raised.

When does this typically become urgent?

Supply chain cyber risk tends to crystallise as a priority at specific moments. Organisations approaching an insurance renewal are often asked to demonstrate their third-party risk management practices for the first time. Those going through merger or acquisition activity find that supply chain security is a growing focus of technical due diligence. Those onboarding a new critical supplier, a managed service provider, a cloud infrastructure partner, a key software vendor, recognise that they are extending significant trust and need to verify that it is warranted.

Public sector organisations facing procurement requirements, professional services firms whose clients are asking for evidence of supply chain assurance, and businesses that have recently experienced an incident (however contained) that involved a third-party element also consistently find that this becomes a priority quickly.

In each case, the trigger is different. The underlying question is the same: do we have genuine visibility of the risk we carry through our supplier relationships, and can we demonstrate that we are managing it?

Cyber threats don’t stand still. Neither do the standards designed to stop them. If your organisation holds Cyber Essentials a Cyber Essentials Plus (CE+) certification, or has been thinking about this certification, there’s something important you need to know: the standard has been updated, and the bar has been raised.

This isn’t a minor tweak. The refreshed Cyber Essentials Plus framework reflects the reality of how businesses operate today, cloud-first environments, remote workforces, mobile devices, and an attack surface that looks nothing like it did when the original standard was written.

The good news? If you act now, you can get ahead of it. Here’s everything you need to know.

Why Cyber Essentials Plus Matters More Than Ever

Let’s start with the basics. Cyber Essentials is the UK government-backed certification scheme designed to help organisations protect themselves against the most common cyber-attacks – phishing, malware, ransomware, and unauthorised access. Cyber Essentials Plus takes that a step further: rather than a self-assessed questionnaire, it involves independent technical verification. An assessor actually tests your systems to confirm your controls work in practice, not just on paper.

For your customers, that distinction matters enormously.

In a landscape where supply chain attacks are increasingly common, your clients, partners, and procurement teams aren’t just asking whether you have a security policy, they’re asking whether you can prove it. CE+ is that proof. It tells the world that your defences have been independently tested and verified, not self-declared. For organisations bidding on government contracts, working in regulated sectors, or handling sensitive customer data, CE+ isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s increasingly a commercial prerequisite.

Beyond the contractual angle, there’s the practical one. Cyber Essentials Plus certification gives your leadership team confidence that the five core technical controls – firewalls, secure configuration, user access control, malware protection, and patch management are genuinely in place and functioning. That confidence has real value when a board is assessing risk, when an insurer is pricing a cyber policy, or when a customer is deciding whether to trust you with their data.

The updated standard makes that assurance even more meaningful, because it’s been designed for the way businesses actually work in 2026 and beyond.

What’s Changed: Old Standard vs New

The original Cyber Essentials framework was built for a world of on-premise infrastructure, desktop computers, and relatively contained network perimeters. That world has largely gone. The updated standard acknowledges this and closes the gaps that the old version left open.

Cloud services are now firmly in scope – Under the previous standard, cloud-hosted services occupied a grey area. Many organisations assumed that if a service was managed by a third-party provider, it fell outside the scope of their assessment. The updated framework makes clear that cloud services including Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms are in scope where your organisation controls the configuration. If your staff are using Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or any other cloud platform, the way those environments are configured now counts. That’s a significant shift for organisations that have migrated heavily to the cloud and assumed their provider was handling security on their behalf.

Home and hybrid working environments are addressed directly – The old standard was written before remote working became the norm for millions of UK employees. The updated version explicitly addresses devices used outside the corporate network – including home broadband routers and personal devices used for work. If your staff are connecting from home, those endpoints and the networks they sit on are now part of the picture. For many organisations, this will require a fresh look at device management, VPN policies, and the controls applied to personally-owned devices used for work purposes.

Thin clients and virtual desktops are included – As more organisations move to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and thin-client environments, the updated standard provides clearer guidance on how these are assessed. The previous version left room for ambiguity; the new one closes it.

Firmware and router security – The updated standard tightens requirements around routers and firewalls, including the firmware running on them. Default credentials, unpatched firmware, and misconfigured boundary devices have been a consistent entry point for attackers, the revised standard makes it harder to overlook these.

Stronger password and authentication requirements – The bar on credential security has been raised. The updated standard aligns more closely with current NCSC guidance on password policies, multi-factor authentication, and account management. If your organisation is still relying on password complexity rules alone, without MFA on internet-facing services, you’ll need to address that before you can certify.

Malware protection scope expanded – The updated framework takes a broader view of malware protection, including application allow-listing as an accepted control and providing clearer guidance on what’s required for different device types. Organisations that have relied on traditional antivirus alone may find they need to review their approach.

Taken together, these changes mean that organisations which previously held CE+ certification cannot assume they’ll pass under the new standard without a fresh assessment of their controls. The scope is wider, the requirements are more precise, and the technical verification is more thorough.

Why you need to ‘Act Now’ and how Cyberfort can help

At Cyberfort, we’ve been working with the Cyber Essentials framework since its inception. We’re an IASME-accredited Certification Body, which means we can take you through the full CE+ process,  from readiness assessment through to certification, with a team that understands both the technical requirements and the commercial pressures you’re working under.

Our approach to CE+ is built around three things: preparation, verification, and remediation.

Preparation – Before we put your organisation through the formal assessment, we work with you to understand your current environment, your devices, your cloud services, your remote working setup, your boundary controls. We identify the gaps against the new standard and give you a clear, prioritised action plan. No surprises on assessment day.

Verification – Our technical assessors carry out the hands-on testing that CE+ requires including scanning your external-facing systems, testing your internal controls, and verifying that what you’ve documented is what’s actually in place. This is where CE+ earns its credibility, and it’s where our experience makes a real difference. We’ve assessed organisations who have different IT estate sizes and complexity, and we know what the assessors look for.

Remediation support – If gaps are found and in our experience, they usually are, particularly under the updated standard, we don’t just flag them and walk away. Our technical team can help you close them, whether that’s configuring MFA across your cloud platforms, tightening your patch management process, or reviewing your device management policies. We see the assessment and the remediation as part of the same engagement, not two separate conversations.

The reason to act now is straightforward: the updated standard is in effect, and the window to prepare is shorter than most organisations realise. If your current certification is due for renewal, you’ll be assessed against the new requirements. If you’re pursuing CE+ for the first time, you’re starting under the new standard from day one. Either way, the organisations that begin their preparation earliest are the ones that certify fastest and the ones that avoid the costly scramble of last-minute remediation.

Why Cyberfort for CE+?

There’s no shortage of organisations offering Cyber Essentials assessments. So why does it matter who you choose?

Because certification is only part of the story. What matters is what happens before the assessment and what you’re left with afterwards.

Cyberfort brings together accredited certification, deep technical expertise, and a genuine understanding of the threat landscape. Our assessors aren’t ticking boxes; they’re experienced security professionals who understand how attackers think and where defences typically fail. That means our pre-assessment work is sharper, our gap analysis is more accurate, and our remediation guidance is practical rather than theoretical.

We also bring continuity. Many of our customers come to us for CE+ and stay with us for broader security services including penetration testing, managed detection and response, and security awareness training. That’s not a sales pitch; it’s a reflection of how security works in practice. Cyber Essentials Plus is a foundation, not a finish line, and having a partner who can support you beyond certification means you’re building on solid ground rather than starting from scratch every year.

Next Steps

Getting started on your CE+ journey with Cyberfort is straightforward. Here’s how the process works:

Step 1 — Scoping conversation. We start with a no-obligation call to understand your environment, your timeline, and your current state of readiness. This takes around 30 minutes and gives us everything we need to scope the engagement accurately.

Step 2 — Readiness assessment. Before the formal CE+ assessment begins, we review your current controls against the new standard and produce a gap report. This is where we identify anything that needs to be addressed before assessment day, giving you time to fix it rather than fail on it.

Step 3 — Remediation (where needed). If gaps exist, our technical team works with you to close them. We provide hands-on support, not just a list of recommendations.

Step 4 — CE+ assessment. Our accredited assessors carry out the technical verification required for CE+ certification. We manage the process end to end, including submission to IASME.

Step 5 — Certification and beyond. Once certified, we’ll work with you to maintain your posture through to renewal and support you with any broader security needs that CE+ has surfaced.

The new standard is here. The question isn’t whether your organisation needs to respond to it, it’s whether you respond now, on your terms, or later, under pressure.

Get in touch with the Cyberfort team today at [email protected] and let’s get your organisation CE+ certified.

By Glen Williams, CEO

Glen Williams, CEO of Cyberfort, recently joined Guy Clapperton on The Near Futurist Podcast to discuss how cyber security has moved far beyond basic antivirus and controls. In this two-part interview series, they explore how the threat landscape is evolving, what hasn’t changed and where businesses need to invest to be protected in the future against a changing cyber-attack landscape.

In part 2 Glen and Guy cover:

• Why certifications are not enough to keep your business secure 
  
• Communicating key cyber security messages across an organisation
  
• The importance of a cyber resilience mindset and culture
  
• Evaluating a cyber security services provider for your business
  
• The UK Cyber Resilience Act and how it will impact businesses

By Glen Williams, CEO

Glen Williams, CEO of Cyberfort, recently joined Guy Clapperton on The Near Futurist Podcast to discuss how cyber security has moved far beyond basic antivirus and controls. In this two-part interview series, they explore how the threat landscape is evolving, what hasn’t changed and where businesses need to invest to be protected in the future against a changing cyber-attack landscape.

In part 1 they explore:

• Why cyber security needs to be taken as seriously as physical security 
  
• The ‘tooling and compliance’ misconception trap many businesses have fallen into
  
• The importance of creating a cyber security culture in a business and not just relying on the IT team
  
• Why deepfake attacks are on the rise and what steps organisations can take to mitigate this type of attack
  
• Why certifications are important, but regular security testing holds the key to becoming resilient against attack

Written by Dan Wood – Group CISO – Cyberfort

With fast-paced changes in technologies, evolving regulations, and changing growth expectations many organisations are finding their risk environments becoming time consuming to manage and difficult to keep under control. Without a structured approach to managing these risks, even the most innovative organisations can face costly disruptions, security incidents, and compliance missteps.

According to Vanta’s latest State of Trust Report, nearly 72% of organisations find their overall risk at an all-time high, while 56% report a recent vendor breach, all highlighting the constant risk to  operations, reputation, and bottom line.

Risk management software offers an efficient way to stay on top of your organisation’s risk landscape and mitigate detected threats. In recent months at Cyberfort we have been reviewing the business use cases for risk management software from a number of providers and how the right risk management tooling can reduce the admin burden of routine risk management tasks, but that is only one part of the equation. We have discovered the Vanta suite offers a lot more than merely time savings when it comes to risk and compliance management.

In this article, I explore the value risk management software brings and provide guidance on choosing the solution that works best for your organisation.

So let’s get started!

What is risk management software?

Risk management software helps organisations streamline risk assessments, tracking, and mitigation with capabilities spanning:

• Risk identification and prioritisation
• Ongoing risk tracking and management
• Reporting and compliance
• Visualisation and decision-making support

Ideally, the software enables organisations to move beyond reactive point-in-time checks to a real-time overview of their risk landscape, allowing for faster response times.

Risk management software plays a key role in demonstrating compliance with popular frameworks and standards, including ISO 27001 and SOC 2, and streamlining audit preparation. Some tools can automatically consolidate real-time data to generate gap analyses, which can be useful to both internal and external auditors.

ROI potential of risk management software

Robust risk management software can also unlock significant savings in the long run. When fully integrated, these solutions scale with your organisation, reducing the need for investment in additional resources and tools as risks evolve.

While the software is valuable for all industries, its ROI may be higher for companies in heavily regulated sectors, such as government, finance, healthcare, and technology, where emerging risks and increased scrutiny make manual tracking impractical and costly. Ineffective risk management can also potentially lead to missed business opportunities in these sectors.

Similarly, many companies begin exploring these tools when scaling initiatives, such as international expansion or mergers and acquisitions, introduce new complexity and increase risk exposure. In these cases, manual processes become too time-consuming and error-prone, ultimately hurting ROI.

Benefits of risk management software

Integrating risk management software into your GRC program also brings various tangible benefits, including:

Enhanced vendor oversight: Gain visibility into third-party risks by linking security review findings to various risk scenarios

Improved efficiency: Automate core risk management processes and assessments, reducing manual workloads and freeing up team capacity 

Demonstrable transparency: Centralise all risk data into a unified risk register, giving stakeholders a clear overview of your organisation’s risk landscape

Informed decision making: Collect risk information from disparate systems, enabling data-driven decisions and optimised resource allocation for impactful mitigation efforts

Proactive risk management: With real-time monitoring and automated alerts, security and IT teams can identify and address risks proactively, strengthening resilience

“From my experience CISO’s respond best to metrics that show measurable risk reduction and efficiency gains. Two of the strongest KPIs are:

1. Percentage of critical risks remediated on time
2. Average time to remediate gaps

This highlights how risk management software accelerates and standardises remediation of high-priority issues and helps executives clearly connect how the investment influences reduced risk exposure and stronger organisational resilience.”

Dan Wood
Group CISO – Cyberfort

Vanta’s Most Valuable Risk Management Features for CISO’s and IT Leaders

For UK CISOs navigating a landscape shaped by UK GDPR, the ICO’s enforcement appetite, and the Cyber Essentials Plus scheme, Vanta’s platform offers several features that stand out as genuinely high value.

Continuous Controls Monitoring is arguably the most impactful. Rather than relying on point-in-time audits, Vanta moves organisations beyond point-in-time assessments with continuous monitoring, real-time alerts, and integrated risk management. For a CISO at a UK financial services firm subject to FCA oversight, this means risks are surfaced and evidenced in real time rather than discovered during an annual audit.

Vendor Risk Management (VRM) is increasingly critical given the supply chain incidents we have witnessed over the past 12 months across a wide range of industry sectors. Vanta’s VRM replaces static point-in-time assessments with continuous, AI-driven risk intelligence, monitoring for vendor changes and delivering real-time alerts with context, severity, and mitigation guidance.

Enterprise Risk Reporting Rollups address a key boardroom challenge all senior cyber security and IT leaders face. Multiple Risk Registers allow organisations to structure risk management around business units, with Enterprise Risk Rollups consolidating those into a unified, real-time dashboard for executive-level visibility,  exactly what a CISO/IT Director presenting to a UK board needs.

Finally, Privacy Automation, covering ROPA management, data inventories, and DPIAs is particularly relevant under UK GDPR. Centralising these into the broader compliance environment provides a real-time, audit-ready view of how personal data is governed across the entire organisation.

Together, these features shift the cyber security and IT team from reactive firefighting to proactive, board-ready risk governance.

5 tips for choosing your risk management software

Based on my recent discussions with a number of customers across a range of sectors, here are my top 5 tips when it comes to selecting a risk management software platform and why I believe Vanta is the best choice on the market today.

1. Determine your organisation’s risk management priorities

Start by defining the categories of risk your organisation must manage, such as operational, compliance, and vendor risks, and how they shape your risk monitoring and mitigation needs.

For example:

• If you handle sensitive data, you may need a solution that supports regulatory compliance and data protection
• If rapid company growth and emerging threats have made manual processes inefficient, you must prioritise automation-enabled solutions
• If you’re working with distributed or remote teams, you may want software that promotes workflow visibility

Consider scalability and long-term alignment from the start if you don’t want to worry about constant add-ons or software replacements down the line.

2. Evaluate technical usability and request demos

Your next step is to evaluate solutions that align with your priorities. Some risk management platforms are versatile and serve multiple industries, while others only support limited sectors, such as healthcare or government contracting.

Besides looking into risk management features, also consider these technical usability factors:

• AI and automation maturity: Check whether the solution uses AI to reliably automate risk and compliance management workflows or predict risk trends
• Deployment method: See if your team better aligns with cloud-based or on-premise solutions, as the latter demands deeper in-house technical expertise
• Regular updates and proper patch governance: Determine if the software receives updates regularly and how visible the patch governance is

Request demos to help you validate these usability aspects and plan a structured adoption process.

3. Assess the software’s integration capabilities

The software’s integration capabilities play a crucial role in its effectiveness. A tool that can integrate easily into your existing system architecture will likely provide a more complete and up-to-date view of organisational risks by consolidating data from multiple sources.

Key systems and processes your risk management software should connect with include:

• Cloud infrastructure
• Identity providers
• Human resources information systems (HRIS)
• Version control
• Vulnerability scanner
• Ticketing tools
• Mobile device management (MDM)

Weaker integrations aren’t necessarily a dealbreaker, but you’ll have to rely more on manual workarounds, which can impact overall efficiency and the speed of adoption.

4. Determine the cost-to-feature ratio

Implementing risk management software is a long-term investment, so it’s important to weigh the cost-to-feature ratio carefully and flag potential extra costs associated with sustained usage.

Before you choose a solution:

• Identify must-have features based on existing needs to avoid paying for unused capabilities
• When calculating the total cost of the software, include factors such as maintenance, setup complexity, training costs, as well as pricing tiers and bundling options

Paying a high upfront price for a capable risk management solution may be worth it in high-risk, heavily scrutinised landscapes, or if your organisation needs to aggressively build customer trust.

5. Assess monitoring and reporting capabilities

Real-time monitoring and alerting are non-negotiable features of any strong risk management software. While nearly all existing solutions offer some form of reporting, you’ll have to focus more on whether you’re getting enough data for decision-making support.

The right solution will provide options for customisation and variety, allowing you to tailor insights to different internal teams, leadership, and even external auditors. For instance, modern risk management tools like Vanta offer numerous risk visibility options, such as: 

• Automated risk registers
• Colour-coded risk matrices based on custom risk scores
• Risk assessment reports with visual aids and mitigation prompts 
• Risk snapshots that can record your posture at a particular point in time and serve as a historical report for auditors

Overall, a granular monitoring and reporting setup can help teams turn risk management into a strategic advantage, supporting decisions that are a clear win for security and growth.

Best practices for implementing your risk management software solution

Follow these best practices to make the adoption of risk management software smoother:

• Prepare systems and processes: Configure your systems and processes ahead of time to make the implementation process smoother. Proactive preparation can help uncover gaps, such as unmapped data processes or conflicting access rights, which can cause friction during rollout.
• Conduct stakeholder training: Train your stakeholders on the new software so they can use it independently. Address potential adoption errors via written or video tutorials.
• Document the effectiveness of the tool: Track the long-term impact of your risk management solution using relevant metrics so you can demonstrate the effectiveness of the solution to leadership.
• Review and update the risk management software: Regularly assess your software to see if it holds up against evolving risk management needs. Check if the tool provides alerts for missing patches or if you should get the IT team involved to configure updates.

Why Vanta is the best risk management software on the market today

As discussed earlier in the article, I have evaluated several risk management software tools in previous months alongside customers in different industry sectors. One thing is clear from both mine and the customers I have talked to – Vanta is the leading risk management and agentic trust platform that offers one of the most comprehensive and scalable feature sets, complete with built-in resources and automation-enabled workflows. Some of the key features the Vanta platform includes:

• Automated risk assessments, reviews, and approval through 400+ integrations
• Automated risk scoring and prioritization
• Risk ownership for better accountability tracking
• A pre-built risk library with 100+ scenarios and suggested control mappings
• Continuous risk monitoring for real-time alerts
• Risk snapshots for better demonstrability during audits
• A dynamic risk register and integrated control recommendations
• A centralised dashboard for seamless accessibility

Cyberfort and Vanta can also work with you to enable third-party risk management workflows and conduct context-rich staff training.

What questions should you ask when evaluating software risk management tools

The key questions to focus on related to your organisation’s tech and risk profile, should include:

• What types of data and systems does your solution support for risk monitoring?
• What workflows are automated, and what will be the level of human intervention?
• What kind of support is available during software adoption?
• How does your risk management software help with compliance?

Final Thoughts

In this article I have discussed why Cyber Security and IT leaders need to be seriously considering risk management software to save time, effort and costs associated with risk and compliance management. From my recent customer interactions and understanding of the risk management software marketplace I believe there are 5 key reasons why Cyber Security leaders should be considering a risk management platform like Vanta:

1. Shift from reactive to proactive. The traditional audit cycle often means risk is discovered too late. Vanta’s continuous controls monitoring means a CISO is not dealing with ambiguity between review cycles, this becomes a critical advantage when regulators like the ICO or FCA can act quickly on incidents.

2. Eliminate tool sprawl. Security teams routinely juggle spreadsheets, standalone GRC tools, and manual reporting. Consolidating into one platform reduces human error, speeds up response times, and gives the CISO a single source of truth.

3. Third-party risk at scale. After several supply chain incidents over the past 12 months, supply chain risk is top of mind. Continuous, AI-powered vendor monitoring replaces annual questionnaires with real-time intelligence. This is  particularly valuable as vendor portfolios grow.

4. Board-ready reporting. CISO’s are spending more time in the boardroom. Enterprise risk rollups mean risk data can be surfaced in a format that non-technical directors understand, without hours of manual consolidation before each meeting.

5. Measurable ROI. Security budgets are under scrutiny. Being able to point to concrete metrics including faster audit cycles, framework coverage across ISO 27001 and UK GDPR, reduced third-party review time, gives Cyber Security and IT leaders a compelling business case that resonates with CFOs and CEOs alike.

If your organisation would like to explore how Cyberfort’s GRC knowledge and Vanta’s risk management software can reduce the time, effort and cost associated with compliance efforts contact us at [email protected] and one of our experts will be in touch.