The concept of the critical path often goes overlooked in the security and IT industry, but it’s an incredibly important aspect to achieving high-value, highly successful solutions for organizations across all industries.
Focusing on the critical path is something we’re proud of here at Craft Compliance.
What is ‘the critical path’?
According to Oxford Languages, the critical path is defined as “the sequence of stages determining the minimum time needed for an operation.”
In this industry, we’ve found there to be a lot of unnecessary “fluff”—i.e. clients are spending their money on useless jargon, middleman work, and cookie-cutter security practices.
At Craft Compliance, we’ve found that by truly understanding what our clients need, aligning on the objectives that will create the desired outcome, cutting out the middlemen, and executing the work ourselves, we’re able to focus on the critical tasks and provide the best value for the job required.
Why is the critical path so important?
Security isn’t one-size-fits-all—and yet so many security firms approach it with a cookie-cutter strategy.
As an organization requiring risk and security services, you either have to spend a lot of time training employees on security practices or a lot of money on consultants.
At Craft Compliance, we bridge the gap by advising on the work to be done and then stepping in to actually do the work itself while educating the team along the way.
We believe that when you focus on individual organizations and their specific security needs, that enables you to approach risk mitigation with greater focus and expertise, increasing the effectiveness of the security services performed while saving time (and expenses) for both parties.
How does focusing on the critical path play out in our client work?
After doing numerous client projects, companies with extensive experience like ours are able to comfortably take industry best practices and standard frameworks and then mold it to each individual client.
Focusing on the critical path means meeting our clients where they’re at. We do this by…
Asking the right questions and listening to the client in order to determine the actual effort and steps required.
Providing guidance to co-develop a tailored action plan to achieve specific goals.
Personally putting the plan into action for the client, providing education and training along the way.
Providing custom, handwritten reports that are easily understandable and actually beneficial to our client.
How does this approach make a difference for clients?
Our critical path-focused approach has been validated in the marketplace as clients have come to us in search of a more complete vendor experience and gotten significant results.
Here are a few examples of how a customized, focused approach can deliver superior results:
A smaller, not-for-profit client of ours wanted a better understanding of how their security stacked up against industry standards. We were able to leverage our knowledge of the industry standards to create a customized approach and deliver tailored feedback. The feedback was focused on relevant, actionable information—rather than an auto-generated report—so the client was equipped to easily take the information given and implement it into their day-to-day operations.
Our web app pen testing reporting is uniquely detailed and targeted to specific client needs. As part of a recent pen test, we identified an ad blocker that classified our client’s website as malicious, resulting in blocked traffic. Our client was not aware of this and was able to quickly take action to ensure its customers could successfully access the website. Our unique, client-specific approach identified this business risk that would likely not have been detected in a typical, automated script that is common for many industry pen tests.
In summary, we’ve found that focusing on the critical path and taking each individual client’s unique nuances and goals into consideration is key for effective, high-value security and IT solutions.
Further questions? Contact us and we’d love to discuss further.