Gordon Shevlin, CEO of Allgress Inc., is responsible for building the right culture within his organization, imparting his employees with both product knowledge and the industry knowledge to help them grow and be effective and ultimately to help customers purchase the right solution for their organization. Planning the future growth of his company includes soliciting and contributing ideas to/from the industry and customers, that remains one of Gordon’s major objectives.
Prior to Allgress, Gordon co-founded SiegeWorks and SiegeWorks International, a digital defense services firm. There he grew the company, built a strong international presence, and managed its successful acquisition by FishNet Security, the nation’s leading provider of information security solutions.
With his breadth of knowledge in information security, Gordon has been invited to serve on the advisory boards of 12 leading information security companies. In addition to being a serial entrepreneur, Gordon has been dedicated to enhancing the knowledge and skills of information security professionals through his volunteer work with ISSA. Among his many roles, Gordon has been President and Vice President of the ISSA Silicon Valley Chapter, CFO of ISSA International, and has held board positions for three consecutive terms.
Gordon’s Mission
Gordon’s mission was to give companies the ability to make the right decisions on what they should be doing to make themselves compliant and secure by giving them the right information to manage their risk, security and compliance on their systems on-premise and in the cloud.
A big issue that he wanted to solve was making the companies much more knowledgeable about their risk and compliance by presenting information that could be understood by different audiences in the organization. Then automating the entire life cycle process to provide efficient and effective management of their risk, security and compliance objectives.
Gordon also sensed that automating processes would help companies and make them more efficient and to reduce the need for more full time employees or consultants and re-deploy those experts in positions where there expertise was required. To accomplish his mission, he Co-founded Allgress.
Allgress: Efficiently Managing the Risk Postures
Founded in 2008, Allgress helps all size organizations security and risk professionals solve the problem of how to assess, understand and manage corporate risk. Its founders and management team are committed to providing CISOs and their staff with the ability to make effective investment decisions that align security and compliance programs with top business priorities, communicate the value of those decisions to senior executives, and manage risk, fines, and brand reputation damage.
Allgress provides operational efficiency and its solutions allow users to assess once and report on many industry best practices and government regulations to report on an organizations risk and compliance posture. Allgress deploys faster than competing solutions and provides rapid business value.
Gordon’s Views on the Current Scenario
Currently the market is experiencing rapidly growing incidents based on cybercrimes against organizations and business partners that carry a strong cost associated with the breaches themselves, brand reputation, fines and loss of critical business partners. The typical scenario of managing risk has been manual processes that included a combination of spreadsheets, email, internal proprietary systems and content sharing systems. The challenge with these combinations, is information is presented in a disjointed way with inaccurate data because of human error. Furthermore, most people in the industry believe that they have security, compliance and risk under their control, especially management, but Gordon strongly knows that it is a false perception.
Innovative solutions like Allgress is changing this scenario by automating many of the human interaction and process. This approach helps the company eliminate their manual spreadsheets and gives them the ability to look at the whole company’s Risks, Compliance and security in a consistent way that enhances good business decisions that result in compliance with best practices, polices and regulations.
Biggest Lessons
One of the major lessons he learned while being in business for such a long period is not only his team, but also the industry as a whole and customers are enabling him be a good leader based on knowing what is important not only to the customers but the industry in General.
Also, attributing to his success is team and the values he instills int them, Gordon asserts, “I have come from great companies that have taught me the people in the company are the ones that make the difference and that as a leader you must give them plenty of rope to learn and make decisions to grow them and make them feel they are part and parcel of the company.”
Innovating Strategies
Gordon has taken Allgress to the top of the industry and is determined to go further. Among all the strategies he follows to stay competitive, he revealed that he and his team have built a product which already has all the workflows and automations build within and can be implemented quickly, instead of building different solutions that require different customizations for different customers. This allowed him to move and create new modules and software more efficiently and quicker than their competition.
Being an innovative and successful leader, Gordon suggests all the people who are starting out their business to understand where their industry is heading and know where the customers’ pain points lies, that is the way one can truly have a solution that will work for the customers and create effective business value. Further, identifying risks quicker, reduces costs and complexity by providing out-of-the box solutions that can be implemented in hours instead of days and months.
Source :- The 30 Most Innovative Business Leaders
