Leadership takes many forms. We recently celebrated our 20th Anniversary at the Archer Summit 2021 in Orlando, marking a long history of leadership in the GRC and Integrated Risk Management space. That same week, Gartner published the second of its two current Risk Management focused Magic Quadrants for the year (IT Risk Management and IT Vendor Risk Management Tools) both of which once again recognized Archer as a “Leader.” Both reports mark the 6th consecutive time we’ve been a Leader, and in total their publication marks 24 consecutive times Archer has been a Leader in any of the Magic Quadrants focused on Risk Management. This is obviously an outcome we’re very proud of as a team, and I think reflects on our continued commitment to execution and vision.
But as I said, leadership takes many forms. And personally, I’m equally proud of many of the areas we’ve executed against a vision in the past year, many of which were not part of the evaluation criteria for Gartner, but were a primary focus at Archer Summit.
Advancing the discussion around quantitative risk analysis beyond Cyber Risk is leadership. We all understand the importance of IT risks (including but not limited to cyber security). And maintaining leadership in these areas is of course an important part of delivering true Integrated Risk Management. But it’s not the only area of risk that organizations need to manage carefully. This is why we launched Archer Insight earlier this year, making us the first of the true IRM providers to extent risk quantification, bowtie and other critical tools for analysis across the full range of risk drivers.
Innovating the industry’s leading risk management platform to support broader stakeholder engagement is leadership. One of Archer’s core capabilities that customer praise the most is how the platform supports very deep dives for the core risk manager/risk administrator persona. But we also see how risk, as it expands into new areas of the business, really requires the participation of a wide range of users, including many who will have much less frequent interaction with the platform. Our development of Archer Engage is aimed directly at supporting risk management teams in their efforts to help first line operators, vendors and other stakeholders participate in risk efficiently and effectively.
Extending core business continuity and IT risk programs into true Operational Resiliency is leadership. The need for organizations to extend beyond what has all to often been a siloed focus on IT business continuity/disaster recovery is not new. But last year’s pandemic and the shock to the system that caused across all aspects of operations has accelerated for many the need to better prepare of disruptive scenarios. And that disruption isn’t limited to IT delivery and in fact needs to be driven by a broad and prioritized view of how these scenarios that could impact the ability to provide products and services. This is exactly where we’ve gone with the recent launch of Archer Operational Resiliency, combining current regulatory guidance and best practices as a foundation for building operational resilience.
Supporting our customers in pursuit of new Board-level strategic imperatives is leadership. From the beginning, risk management was meant to focus on the most critical strategic areas of a business. Continuous waves of regulation drove some to turn focus towards regulatory compliance and audit capabilities, also a core tenant of Integrated Risk Management. But we see Boards and CEO’s increasingly expecting their Risk Management functions to focus more fully on awareness, assessment and response to those risks that threaten overall corporate valuation. Few business trends have taken Board-level discussion by storm the way ESG (Environmental, Social & Governance) has over the past year. This drove the very recent launch of Archer ESG, which we see as an incredibly natural extension of how customers leverage our platform today, providing improved ability to gather, assess and align ESG data with internal plans and external regulations. And most importantly, help organizations gain early visibility into the risks that threaten ESG success.
A thanks to the entire Archer Community for all that they’ve done and continue to do to drive us to lead. Many of you have spurred the development that supports our Leadership recognition by Gartner. More still have acted as catalysts in these recent areas of innovation. And finally, a thank you to those from the Archer Community that were able to join us at this year’s Archer Summit, in person or virtually. We look forward to the next year of news and developments from Archer, and sharing those with all of you.