Apptega Product Newsletter - December Edition

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rb
rb Posts: 1 admin
edited July 11 in Product Discussions

I can’t believe it’s December already. Every year, I end up doing holiday shopping at the last minute. The user experience is wild - multiple, random trips to the mall (for you online shoppers, a mall is one of those big buildings with not enough parking, too many people, and too many shops), stressful guesses at what my wife will not return, and maybe the occasional cocktail for me to take the edge off. This high adrenaline experience results in family members getting expensive gifts due to poor planning on my part (my wife has yet to complain about this).

In the same tradition, the R&D organization is happy to share our December to Remember! For this festive time of year, we bring you not only joy and happiness but Task Recurrence, a better user experience, new dashboards, and a TON of Q1 planned work!

Expanding the Team 

Building a world-class SaaS platform requires great team members. I’d like to start this monthly update by welcoming our newest team members who joined in November/December. We are excited to see the contribution these talented team members will make to Apptega as we scale the platform in 2025!

December Releases and in-flight initiatives 

Tasks 

Just like UGA Football, the Product team continues to win, and the Task Module is our next touchdown!  When you are in Product, winning means delivering quality features that provide value and efficiency to our customers. Here is the Task playoff schedule: 

  • December 2024: GA Launch of Task Recurrence. We are moving out of early release into GA over the next few days and will send a broader communication when it is.  
    • This new and improved functionality has been in product for a few weeks with select customer’s using the new function as well as being demoed. 
    • Final update for GA is updating the UI and additional filtering and sorting in the list view for frequency, category, control, and due date. 
  • Early January 2024: Consolidated Task Email Notifications - providing users with a daily digest of the Tasks assigned to them 
  • February 2025: Many-to-Many Tasking - enabling Tasks to be used to manage workflows across the platform (e.g. Risks) 
  • February 2025: Bulk Import for Recurrence - enable users to bulk import Recurring Tasks for improved customer experience, usability, and feature optimization 

 

Reporting & Dashboards 

Reporting: It’s been an eventful year for Reporting and we have one last release before the Holiday. We will be enabling the modified version of the expanded Assessment Report for General Availability. Reporting has worked hard this year and, other than bug fixes, will be out of the office until the New Year with more improvements and transformations planned. 

Dashboards: The Product elves have been busy tinkering in the toyshop and came out with a nice end-of-year release of Dashboards. 

We will be releasing 3 new dashboards prior to the holidays for Partners and our Direct Customers.  

  1. Partner dashboard - This will give Partners a bird’s eye view of their tenants and activities within those tenants. The goal is to help bring attention to specific tenants that need additional focus. From this dashboard, a user will be able to drill down into a specific tenant. 
  2. Individual customer dashboard - This will provide a detailed overview of the status of an individual customer environment, providing insights into the status of Documents, Tasks, Risks, Vendors, Controls and more. From this dashboard, a user will be able to drill into a specific tenant framework. 
  3. Framework dashboard – This dashboard provides clear visibility into the completion status of individual controls, enabling teams to track and prioritize their compliance efforts effectively. Organizations gain confidence in their compliance posture, making it easier to demonstrate accountability and meet regulatory expectations.

Content 

The Team continues to make improvements to our Content currency, accuracy, and mappings. 

  • NIST 800-171a Rev 3 framework, assessment, and task pack will be available in the platform this week following final scoring review. Harmony mappings for NIST 800-171a Rev 3 will be released in Q1. 
  • The HIPAA Security Framework and Assessment formatting changes are complete and in Production. 
  • Updates to the NIST 800-53 Rev 5 framework and assessment are in process. 
  • CIS v8.1 Updates will be completed and released in January 2025. 
  • CJIS Framework will be built as a standard framework in Q1 2025. 
  • Harmony Mappings 
    • Updates to CMMC 2.0 Mappings are now live in Production (Objective Criteria mappings included) 
    • Updates to ISO 27001:2022 Mappings are in demo for review. Production release 11/1 
    • Updates to NIST CSF 2.0 Mappings are in progress. Production Release 11/8 
    • Next: Harmony updates for new frameworks and data syncing  

  

Program Management (Controls) UI Improvements 

  1. GA: Enhanced Documents, Tasks, Control Activities, and Risks are now GA to all users of the Apptega Platform! 
    1. Manage Documents with ease: The document section is more intuitive by splitting out the new file upload and link existing file functions. You can also sort the list and see the count of documents for each control. 
    2. Tasks made easy: Need to assign a task for a Control? No problem! Create tasks via a intuitive popup with a quick link to access the task board 
    3. Control Activities: Similar to the improved Document workflow, you’ll find two new popups - one for creating a control activity and one for linking an existing one. 
    4. Find what you need with ease! Every doc, task, risk, or control activity can be sorted and searched 
    5. Performance matters and we have implemented a series of performance improvements improving the customer experience 
  2. Next: Enhanced notes - add multiple notes instead of one big note. Also records the date and author of the note 
  3. Next: Enhanced comments - improved UI/readability, sorting newest to oldest 

  

Integrations  

Taking the friction out of security & compliance! 

Last 30 Days 

  • Integrations team has deployed our Microsoft Defender for Cloud integration to staging for testing

In Flight 

  • Expanding our Cloud Integrations:  We're building PoC with a new cloud integration platform that will enable us to bring on new tasking integrations and reduce the technical overhead to manage them 
  • Scaling through innovation: Product & engineering scoping for our Automated Evidence platform 
    • This system will intake raw metadata from our integrations and map it to our Common Controls enhancing the value of the integrations by mappnig them to the specific controls with associated commentary. 
  • Integration prioritization: In addition to evaluating past data we collected, the team is reviewing the tech stacks of current Partners and layering in market data to help make more informed prioritization decisions. If there is an integration that is important to you, please create a ticket with your request and details.  

 

 

1H 2025 - Apptega 2.0 

New UI Phase 1: Assessment Manager / Program Management!!! 

We are excited to share that the team has started work on building out the new Apptega UI and associated capabilities. As you have seen in the product demos, this is a transformational initiative that will result in a modern look and feel, new capabilities, and a much more extensible platform. Phase 1 is focused on Assessment Manager based on user feedback, the fact that it is the tip of the spear and will set the stage for work we do across the Platform. Some of the new functionality is listed below. The timing for each of these features is TBD, is based on development scope, and will be communicated accordingly. 

  • Phase 1 focus is Assessment Manager and improving time to value, usability, and the implementation of new functionality to streamline assessment workflows. Here are some of the areas we are addressing: 
    • Modern, and consistent, look and feel from the new Apptega design system 
    • Lifecycle management of Assessments: Introducing the concept of Draft and Archive. As the name implies, Draft status allows users to save Assessments in a draft state to be edited and reviewed before taking the assessment. Archive status allows users to archive Assessments for future reference. 
    • Choose your Assessment Path: Users will be able to take the prescribed Assessment for a given Framework (e.g. PCI 4) OR select from Apptega’s standard Assessment (think “easy button”) to answer questions that map to the corresponding framework(s). Also, the ability to ingest custom assessments will be available. 
      • We will also build on the ability to “assign users” (currently in edit assessment) in the standard workflow. 
    • Easier to read & navigate: A new and improved Assessment view giving users access to key information in a clean UI format. This screen will show scoring, categories, subcategories, my questions filtering, and category statuses. 
    • Easier to complete: Based on user feedback, our UX project, and other inputs, we will introduce more efficient assessment response workflows and enhanced ways to link question notes, recommendations, and risks making it easier and faster to run an assessment. 
      • Quickly add/link: Attaching documents/links and risks to questions will a breeze as users review their document library and risks register in a right-side list. The user can upload or create anything not already in the platform to the list including drag and drop. 
      • Bulk responses: Based on interviews with customers and our SAs, users want to bulk respond to questions (No or N/A) when it isn’t a formal audit. Users can select all questions they wish to answer at one time, select the response, attach documents/links once, add notes/recommendations, and link risks all at once and bulk apply the response detail to the selected questions. 
      • Focused workflow: Respond to assessment questions in a collapsed view allowing the user to quickly answer questions, and see the number of documents, notes, recommendations, and risks linked to the question without having to click into the question. 
  • You can expect to see incremental releases starting with Assessment Manager in Q1 followed by enhanced UI for other Program Management features throughout the first half of 2025. 

  

Wrapping up 

We have a few weeks left in the year. All of us at Apptega will be heads down on execution on these key deliverables while we ramp up for 2025 and continue to support Sales & Customer Success needs. I want to thank our Partners and Customers for the partnership with Apptega. We have a lot of great things planned for 2025. Let’s go!!! 

rb 

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