In a changing digital landscape, black or white decisions simply aren't enough. That's why Gartner calls for continuous adaptive risk and trust assessment, or CARTA. This is a key imperative on the journey to Zero Trust architecture. To meet the demands of the modern threat environment, we need a framework that can evaluate a user's risk continuously and contextually, even after authentication.
What is CARTA?
Carta Adaptive Risk and Trust Assessment is a cloud-based solution for managing portfolios, valuations, holdings and more. It enables enterprises to streamline the process of tracking investments through centralized dashboards, and helps venture capitalists review evolving Internal Rates of Return (IRR) on a continuous basis. The system also lets business owners store paper certificates in a vault, eliminating the risk of theft or loss.
A free tier, known as Launch, is available to new customers, with paid plans offering more advanced features such as 409A valuations and exit modeling. The company also offers a range of additional products, including Carta Liquidity and Carta Total Compensation. The company is trusted by 30,000 companies, over 5,000 investment funds and half a million employees to manage their equity and track company ownership. Its platform includes a cap table management tool, which allows users to monitor and update the distribution of equity among key stakeholders. It also includes a 409A valuation tool, which helps companies stay compliant with tax laws. The company also has a private stock exchange, called CartaX, which provides a means for shareholders to find liquidity in their shares.
How does CARTA work?
CARTA is an innovative new assessment methodology that combines the best of quantitative, qualitative and psychometric approaches to produce better risk assessment data. It provides a more holistic view of an organization's security posture by assessing all of the risks to a business, rather than just looking at specific threats. It also takes into account how people, networks, and devices interact to identify vulnerabilities in the system. By leveraging technologies like machine learning and anomaly detection, CARTA Adaptive Risk and Trust Assessment allows businesses to detect threats that bypass their prevention systems. This allows them to spend less time responding to security breaches and more time improving their overall cyber hygiene.
Unlike traditional block and allow security solutions, CARTA Continuous Adaptive Trust Assessment assesses users and devices continuously. It uses context to determine what level of trust to give them and evaluates this in real-time, adjusting accordingly. This is an essential component of the Zero Trust framework, and it helps businesses overcome many of the challenges that come with today's increasingly complex network environments. Ultimately, CARTA Continuous Adaptive Trust Assessment is an ideal security solution for modern organizations that offer digital services to consumers. These companies open their networks to many more individuals without traditional authorization, and they need a security model that balances business-friendliness with protection that doesn't begin and end with Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). Fortunately, CARTA has the tools needed to meet these challenges.
Why should I use CARTA?
Traditional IT security solutions favor black and white decisions, essentially blocking users or devices from accessing an organization's networks based on their potential risk. CARTA takes a different approach, advocating continuous evaluation of all users and devices with contextual decision-making. In this way, organizations can detect threats much sooner than they would if they were using manual security assessments.
Carta is the most widely used equity management software with over 2 trillion dollars in private assets under its control. Its customers include companies, investment funds and employees who use its services for cap table management, compensation management, granting, liquidity and venture capital solutions. It also serves as the source of truth for its user's company equity, providing audit-ready valuations, running controlled liquidity events and issuing electronic securities. Carta has an existing network of startups and investors that it can leverage to develop new products. For example, it has already created Carta Total Compensation for compensation benchmarking and is preparing to release Carta Liquidity, an open marketplace for private equity. In addition, it is leveraging aggregated data to create publicly available insight into private market trends.
What are the benefits of CARTA?
Using CARTA Adaptive Risk and Trust Assessment, enterprises can reduce costs by minimizing the amount of time spent managing security risks. The technology enables faster threat detection and response, which prevents costly hacker attacks from penetrating the organization. The methodology also improves breach discovery times so that businesses can shut down breaches and mitigate them before they cause significant damage.
Gartner predicts that CARTA will become one of the top IT security trends in 2019 and beyond. As more businesses embark on digital transformation journeys, they need to ensure that stringent security mechanisms are in place. Otherwise, data breaches can erode business reputation and lead to loss of millions of dollars. The foundation of CARTA is the Zero Trust framework, which advocates that no users or devices – even those already inside a network – should be inherently trusted. However, zero trust is just a framework that's not enough on its own to manage security risk. To be truly effective, organizations need a security infrastructure that continuously evaluates and assesses users and devices to make contextual access decisions. Unlike traditional role-based access control (RBAC), which uses binary block/allow decisions, CARTA utilizes attribute-based access control to enable continuous, context-aware security assessment in real time. It enables security solutions to identify, analyze, prioritize and monitor all user actions from initial login to downloading of sensitive data.
