In an interview with Insight Success, Robert O’Brien, founder and CEO of MetaCompliance, shares his views on information security and compliance software, and the company’s eLearning, GDPR, policy management, incident management and phishing solutions that its clients trust to help them to create a better relationship with employees and regulators. “Our company helps our clients keep their staff safe online, protect their digital assets and defend their corporate reputation. This is a combination of increasing the vigilance of employees for cyber security threats and compliance breaches whilst at the same time documenting and creating audits to facilitate regulatory reporting,” says Robert.
Below are the highlights of the interview:
Give a brief overview of your background and your role in MetaCompliance.
I am founder and CEO of MetaCompliance; I am involved in all aspects of the business. My most important role is supporting innovation and leading our teams. I enjoy the development of ideas through to finished products and projects. I feel passionately about the necessity for organisations to invest in keeping their people safe online and protect their digital assets.
What products or strategies you use to entice your company’s target audience?
We believe in giving value to our perspective clients from the outset. We have worked hard to provide valuable resources on our website that can help organisations to develop staff education programs around cyber security awareness and compliance. We have deep domain expertise in cyber security and privacy stretching back over 12 years. In that time we have helped every conceivable type of organisation develop responses to the growing cyber threat and implement strategies to defend against regulatory scrutiny.
What inspiration do you take from the personality that you consider as your role model and what virtues of him/her do you want to inculcate in your everyday life?
I have always liked Richard Branson. He has cultivated an excellent brand in Virgin. I really like the way they were constantly pursuing new innovations. Interestingly, he is back in the news again with problems with the airline because of COVID-19. He has managed to remain relevant over time. I try and incorporate differentiation in our brand as a result of being inspired by Virgin.
Being an impeccable leader in enterprise security, what has been your contribution in the evolution of this sector?
I have had a vision of a single solution that provides organisations with an easy to use, one stop shop for managing privacy and cyber security awareness. I believe that there is too much complexity in the myriad of tools that are available for CISO’s and compliance managers. In addition, I believe that the employee is the common denominator and we have always focused on engaging the user by providing a user friendly portal for completing their security obligations. I have helped organisations to address the challenge of engaging employees with a cyber-security culture in order to mitigate risks.
What are some of the vital attributes, in your opinion, that every influential leader should possess?
An influential leader should possess a mind of his/her own. When it comes to the difficult decisions no one else can do the job for you. You have to elicit input from your team but the final decision is what you are there for. It is not possible to democratise this type of leadership. It inevitably means that you will make mistakes because we cannot be right all the time. An influential leader accepts this and deals with the decision making requirement with speed and stoicism.
How do you cope with the everevolving technological advancements in the markets?
The ever changing aspects of technology and the market that we exist in are an element of this job that I really enjoy. The majority of these changes make life easier and provide the ability to scale and increase our reach beyond domestic markets. The development of SaaS based software organisations is case in point. Based on the development of global infrastructure, it’s now possible for fast growing software companies to leverage this scale and deploy solutions anywhere on the planet. This was difficult based on the old on-premise client server approach.
What advice would you like to give to the emerging entrepreneurs? It’s all about the journey not the arrival. We spend so much time battling every day to make progress towards our goals that we forget that this is actually what it’s all about.
What are your future desired goals? What endeavours you are taking to achieve them?
I want to make MetaCompliance the natural “go to” choice for organisations that need a solution to ensure cyber security awareness and manage their privacy life cycle. Our goal is to become a leader in cyber security software and to achieve this we are expanding in Europe and North America.
Robert O’Brien | Founder & CEO | MetaCompliance
