Frequently asked questions

Yes, and we recommend to make use of it!

Dive in with a 30-day free trial and take our platform for a spin. Experience all that vucavoid has to offer without any commitments. We mean it when we say, "No strings attached." Give it a go, and see the magic for yourself!

If you decide to stick around, you can use your trial tenant with all data in it.

In case you do not want to continue, your tenant will be locked until you proceed to subscribe to our monthly or yearly plan - no automated billing/upgrade: You decide!

For those on our monthly plans, you're free to cancel every month. If you're on an annual plan, you can opt-out every year. Say goodbye to tedious 3-month notice periods. Just ensure you cancel before your next billing cycle, and you're good. We keep things straightforward and stress-free! 

vucavoid is a comprehensive compliance management SaaS designed to streamline compliance and security management in one unified platform. It's focus is to strenghten your organization's resilience.

Here's what you can expect:

• Document your organization's meta model, calculate the business criticality of all objects in it and inherit values like confidentiality, integrity, availability, authenticity and even recovery time objective (RTO) or recovery point objective (RPO) downstream in your meta model.

• Manage all facets of security compliance including risks, incidents, controls, assessments, and tasks.

• Incorporate it for information security, data protection, and general compliance management.

• Utilize the MITRE ATT&CK framework to design and evaluate your cyber threats.

• Develop a custom meta-model to align compliance management with your real-world assets such as legal entities, IT assets, products, and more.

At vucavoid, we prioritize our own compliance and security. We consistently evaluate and enhance our security posture. For a detailed overview, please visit our Security page. 

VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity.

It's a term used to convey the inherent challenges businesses face due to unpredictable information, risky investments, and uncertain results. Modern organizations implement various strategies, like standardized processes and frameworks, to tackle these challenges.

In the realm of compliance and security, VUCA is even more pronounced. Since businesses directly face VUCA factors, their compliance and security teams not only have to address those challenges but also the ones unique to their domain such as unknown threats and incidents.

vucavoid is dedicated to cut the VUCA out of your compliance management.

Absolutely, we do!

We are passionate about fostering a compliant world. If you’re a non-profit or an educational institution, reach out to us. We have exclusive pricing tailored just for you. Let’s champion compliance and make a lasting impact, side by side!

Paddle, our payment processor, acts as the merchant of record. This means they handle the transaction, leading to their name appearing on your bank statement. Rest assured, your primary client-vendor relationship remains with us. For a deeper dive, check out: https://www.paddle.com/about/why-has-paddle-charged-me. 

We've partnered with Paddle, our Merchant of Record (MoR), to process payments. Currently, you can use credit cards and PayPal for transactions. When checking your statements, you'll notice charges from Paddle. For more on this, visit: https://www.paddle.com/about/why-has-paddle-charged-me. 

Choosing vucavoid is a strategic decision to stay ahead in an evolving compliance landscape. Here's why:

• Navigating a Complex Landscape: The world of compliance and security management is rapidly evolving. As international regulations tighten and stakeholders raise their expectations, it's crucial to ensure your compliance posture meets the mark, whether it concerns information security or other compliance profiles.

• Talent Acquisition Challenges: Hiring compliance and security professionals, especially experienced ones, has become increasingly challenging. In regions like Europe, a compliance expert's annual salary can range between 60.000 EUR to 110.000 EUR, with variations based on location and expertise.

• Cost-Effective Solution: When you factor in the costs associated with hiring, onboarding, and equipping an expert, such as laptops and workspace provisions, vucavoid's annual subscription for just 8.091 EUR (or 10.788 EUR for the monthly plan) isn't just an economical alternative — it offers a staggering cost advantage, beating the traditional compliance manager option by a minimum factor of approximately 6 to 14. And this factor only accounts for substituting for one compliance manager; the more you make use of vucavoid, the more you will be able to replace missing personnell.

• This substantial savings underlines the exceptional value vucavoid brings to your organization, ensuring you get the best bang for your buck without compromising on compliance quality.

• Efficiency and Scalability: vucavoid isn't just a cost-saving tool. It acts as a force multiplier, enhancing the productivity and efficiency of your entire compliance team. Think of vucavoid as a 24/7 compliance manager that doesn't just replace the workload of a professional but augments the capabilities of your existing team every single day, regardless of timezones or holidays.

In essence, by investing in vucavoid, you're not just saving costs – you're streamlining operations, ensuring compliance, and bolstering the efficacy of your team.

Absolutely! It's your choice on how to engage on the platform. You can invite external collaborators and assign them specific roles to ensure they can only access designated areas. For added security, you can even set account validity periods or lock them for set intervals. And if you prefer, you can use vucavoid solo — it's entirely up to you! 

Great news for you! vucavoid doesn't set an upper cap on user additions. Why? Because we believe that placing limits on user licenses or introducing expensive upselling packages for more user accounts can artificially hamper the natural flow of compliance management. True compliance management thrives when everyone is involved, especially in areas such as risk identification, control measures, incident handling, and beyond.

Once you're subscribed, you have the freedom to onboard as many users as you need, be they from your internal team or external partners. To ensure your experience is as streamlined as possible, vucavoid is equipped with a sophisticated role system. This system allows you to grant specific access levels to each user, enabling a smooth and efficient management process.

The only difference lies in the savings. With an annual subscription, you'll enjoy a discount of over 25% compared to the monthly subscription. 

vucavoid believes in accessibility for all. We offer a single, full-featured license. Once you subscribe to vucavoid, you'll have access to all our features and can onboard as many users as you desire without any restrictions. 

Embarking on your vucavoid journey is facilitated in multiple ways:

• Every new user is greeted with a role-specific onboarding experience directly within the application.
• Each feature is complemented by comprehensive documentation that includes a screencast, ensuring you can both read about and visually understand its potential.
• Should you have any queries or need assistance, don't hesitate to reach out to our support team. We're always here to assist and ensure you have a smooth experience.

Getting started with vucavoid is straightforward:

• Test our platform for free, in the 30-day trial period (access to all features).

• Decide between an yearly or monthly subscription and proceed to checkout.

• Provide the necessary details during checkout and subsequently log in to the application.

• The account you use during checkout will become your application's first user and be assigned the role of the tenant admin. From here, you can easily invite additional users, whether internal or external.

• As users join, they'll be assigned specific access roles and will be guided through a role-tailored onboarding process within the application.

• For insights into potential workflows and more detailed guides, consult our documentation. Remember, tailor vucavoid to fit your unique needs.

vucavoid acts as a straightforward assistant to navigate you seamlessly through your security compliance management. It's designed to make compliance uncomplicated and approachable. With vucavoid, you can effortlessly onboard any user from control owners to incident reporters, ensuring everyone remains within the platform without needing external tools. The integrated VUCA score then prioritizes your tasks, indicating areas of high importance or criticality. 

MITRE ATT&CK is a renowned framework in the industry, outlining and explaining various (cyber) threats:

• Industry-Standard Framework: It provides up-to-date insights into tactics and techniques used by attackers, making it an invaluable resource for understanding and combating threats.
• Anticipate Future Threats: While advanced persistent threats (APTs) might seem distant, the tactics they use today could be mainstream tomorrow. Knowing these techniques prepares you for the evolving threat landscape. You need to stay ahead of the heard, be an early mover.
• Common Language for Threat Landscape: The most significant advantage of MITRE ATT&CK is that it provides a unified language to understand threats. Whether it's a SOC analyst talking to a developer or an infrastructure admin discussing with DevOps, there's no lost translation. Everyone understands and can act efficiently.

With vucavoid, you can leverage this framework to not just understand threats but to challenge and test your systems against them. This proactive approach ensures you’re always a step ahead in compliance and security.

"Compliance challenges" are a unique and dedicated feature within vucavoid designed to work like robust assessments. Here's how they function to keep you at the forefront of compliance:

• Assessment Tool: With this feature, you can put your meta model, which we term as the "challenge scope", to the test. Challenge it against a predefined set of requirements or even a specially modeled threat based on the MITRE ATT&CK framework, which is referred to as the "challenge benchmark".
• Dynamic Assignments: Each pairing of your chosen scope and benchmark births what we call a "challenge slot". Think of this as a specific assessment task. You can then assign this slot to anyone you deem fit for the assessment – perhaps an in-house expert or an external consultant. Simply invite them to vucavoid, delegate the challenge slot, and, if it suits your needs, you can even set this challenge to recur at regular intervals.
• Recurring Challenges for Consistency: Opting for recurring challenges ensures regular checks on compliance adherence, be it against ISO standards, specific laws, contractual obligations, or a blend of various requirements. This way, you're not just ticking off a one-time task but are in continual alignment with dynamic compliance needs.
• Stay Updated and Aligned: The main goal of these challenges is to ensure you always have a real-time view of where you stand in terms of compliance. With vucavoid's challenges, you're not just on track; you're ahead of the curve.

With vucavoid's compliance challenges, maintaining a steady compliance posture becomes more manageable and effective. Dive in and experience a proactive approach to your compliance journey.

Absolutely! With vucavoid, you're not just getting a compliance platform but also a robust task management system. Here's what you can do:

• Comprehensive Task Management: Create, assign, and track tasks that are crucial to your compliance initiatives.
• Custom and Recurring Tasks: Add customized tasks based on your needs and set them to recur if needed. You can also link these tasks to various parts of the application.
• Automated Reminders: We understand the importance of deadlines in compliance. That’s why our system sends out automated reminders to ensure tasks are completed on time.
• Watchers Feature: You can designate watchers for tasks, ensuring that the right people are always in the loop and informed about the task’s status.

Yes, vucavoid supports all of these certifications and more!

• ISO 27001: Add the certification requirements you're aiming for and set up a recurring challenge for your desired certification scope (meta model). Track open findings, risks, or link controls to evaluate and document your progress.

• ISAE 3402 & SOC-2: Input your control matrix into vucavoid, schedule the reporting cycles, and gather evidence. Utilize our reporting features to identify any gaps and tag related findings or risks.

• Other Standards: You can also add requirements from other standards, link them to controls, set recurring control reporting if desired, and use recurring challenges to ensure you meet your requirements and maintain a clear view of your compliance stance.

In short, vucavoid is your comprehensive solution for mastering your compliance management requirements, no matter the standard or certification.

Absolutely! At vucavoid, we believe that businesses of all sizes should have access to top-notch compliance management. That's why our platform is scalable and designed to cater to everyone, from startups to established businesses. Notably, for SMEs:

• Simple Pricing: We offer just two pricing plans, monthly and annual, that include all features and cater to an unlimited number of users. No complicated fee structures or unexpected upsells.

• Affordable Rates: Opt for our annual subscription and enjoy a 30% discount.

• Hassle-Free Onboarding: Forget about costly, long-winded onboarding projects. Sign up for a free trial, invite your team, and test drive our platform.

• Continuous Updates: We're always improving, which means you get to enjoy future feature updates to better your compliance management experience.

In essence, vucavoid is set to revolutionize how companies, big or small, handle compliance management.

• Defining Compliance Requirements: Compliance requirements refer to the myriad laws, regulations, guidelines, and contractual obligations businesses must adhere to, especially when operating across different jurisdictions or serving diverse clientele.
• The Complexity of Compliance in a Globalized World: For mid-sized businesses dealing with a clientele base spanning over 20 clients, possibly spread across different countries, the challenge intensifies. Every jurisdiction, industry, and even individual client contracts might carry unique requirements. Consider scenarios such as:
• Abiding by specific data protection laws in Europe.
• Ensuring physical security protocols for a manufacturing client.
• Meeting industry-specific standards, such as in finance or healthcare.
• The Sheer Volume of Requirements: It's not uncommon to encounter a situation where a business might have to consider 500 or more individual requirements. However, upon closer examination, many of these might overlap or be quite similar. You could find that these numerous requirements can be distilled down to a more manageable number, say 50-100 unique core requirements.
• vucavoid’s Solution to Requirement Clustering: vucavoid provides an intuitive solution to this overwhelming challenge. Here's how:
• Requirement Clustering: Instead of addressing each requirement individually, vucavoid allows businesses to group similar requirements into clusters. For instance, given the universal importance of physical security across industries, why address each client's physical security requirement separately? Group them into a single cluster and handle them collectively.
• Reference Linking: Within these clusters, you can then add references to the specific regulations, contracts, or guidelines from which they emerged. This ensures that while you're dealing with the cluster as a singular entity, you’re not losing the context or specifics of each individual requirement.
• Efficient Evaluation: The benefits of such a streamlined approach are manifold. One of the most evident advantages is efficiency. With vucavoid, once you've evaluated a requirement cluster, there's no need to repeatedly assess it for every individual instance. This means reduced redundancy and a more streamlined compliance process.
• In essence, vucavoid transforms a potentially herculean task into a methodical and manageable process, ensuring businesses remain compliant without getting bogged down by the volume and intricacies of diverse requirements.

vucavoid is meticulously structured to cater to a wide variety of compliance and security standards. Specifically:

• Information Security Management: Manage and oversee your organization's approach to handling information securely and prevent data breaches.
• Diverse Compliance Standards: Whether it's ISO 9001 for quality management, ISO 22031 for BCMS (with a note that functionalities for BIA, BCP, or BCM exercises are still in development), PCI-DSS, NIST standards, or GDPR, vucavoid supports them all.
• General Internal Control System: With vucavoid, you can effortlessly manage your internal control matrix. From scheduling control reportings, flagging control deficiencies to linking findings, risks, and incidents to your controls, vucavoid has got you covered.
• Certification Support: Aim for certifications like ISAE or SOC standards? vucavoid is designed to facilitate your journey towards obtaining such certifications by offering tools for effective control management, evidence collection, and reporting.
• Flexibility and Adaptability: Regardless of your business size, industry, or regulatory background, vucavoid offers a versatile platform tailored to meet your unique compliance management needs. The platform's design empowers users to customize their compliance approach, ensuring efficiency and relevance.

In essence, vucavoid offers a comprehensive suite of tools and functionalities, making it the go-to solution for diverse compliance and security requirements.

A meta model in vucavoid acts as a blueprint for your business organization, providing an abstract representation of its structure and operations. Here's a breakdown of its significance and how it fits within vucavoid:

• Two-layered Approach: The meta model is thoughtfully divided into two primary layers: Capabilities and Objects.
  • Capabilities: These are the essence of "What" a business does. For instance:
    1. Customer Relationship Management: The core competency in managing and optimizing customer interactions throughout their lifecycle.
    2. Talent Acquisition and Development: The expertise in attracting, hiring, and nurturing the right talent aligned with organizational objectives.
    3. Financial Forecasting and Reporting: The skill set required for anticipating financial trends and reporting current fiscal situations.
  • Objects: These address the "How" aspect. Objects include foundational entities like teams, locations, or legal bodies, as well as more intricate ones like IT assets, physical assets, or information assets. These are vital components that, when interlinked appropriately, enable an organization to showcase its capabilities in the market.
• Importance in Compliance Management: Compliance isn't just about adhering to rules; it's about ensuring the business can operate effectively and confidently in its domain. This is where the meta model shines:
  • Business Enablement: Compliance allows businesses to participate in markets, steer clear of fines, avoid reputational damage, and access specific tenders, or it might just be an organization's inherent motivation to maintain standards. The meta model ensures that compliance activities are targeted efficiently.
  • Protecting Business Assets: The meta model helps identify and safeguard the objects crucial for running capabilities. By understanding what your business does (capabilities) and how it does it (objects), you can more effectively target compliance efforts to protect and support those areas.

In conclusion, the meta model in vucavoid offers clarity in the often complex landscape of compliance management. By presenting a structured representation of your business, it assists in efficiently aligning compliance tasks with business objectives, ensuring that compliance serves to empower, not hinder, your business operations.