Today we are excited to announce Vala Secure! But this is more than a new brand –– it's a renewed focus on our beliefs, why we come to work everyday, and the plan we have for our clients. Below sheds more light on our beliefs and our vision for the future.

1. Working with SPEED

Rebranding is an opportunity to refine our vision and our values. We asked ourselves "Why do people come to us? Why not go to a competitor? What is it about what we do that keeps them coming back?" We believe this goes back to something that doesn't change -- our SPEED values:

• Serve – A servant attitude, no matter how much experience we hold, is required to continually put our clients before ourselves. We want the focus to be on their success.
• Perform – Performance takes on different levels. We must perform well for our clients, for each other, and for ourselves each and every day.
• Educate – We want to provide a guide like experience through a clients information security journey. Everyone's goals are different and we must be adaptable to ensure success for each one.
• Energize – We want to bring positive energy to any situation. A positive outlook helps remove the fear of the situation and keeping a focus on building a proactive plan.
• Delight – Delighting someone means providing something that they didn't expect and goes above just what we promised.

If we are able to impart those values through our work we believe we work with SPEED and provide a truly exceptional customer experience.

2. Overcoming Your Fear

Many of our clients are afraid to do things in their business for fear of the risk or getting hacked. They are afraid to invest, they're afraid to add people because they are afraid of exams. They are afraid of getting hacked or breached. That's not how we want anyone running a business and we can help guide anyone through a plan to help them navigate the cyber seas.

3. Security is More than Compliance

We don't want to be a baseline compliance team. We don't want to be a check-the-box company. We want to be more and offer more than that. We want to be the security standard that we set for other folks. When clients come to us, they get something that's better than what they can get from just being FFIEC or BSA compliant.

4. Challenge Based Guidance

Clients push us to be better. It's a game we are playing: they are trying to up their ante and say "try to hack me, see if you can catch me." And we try to up our game to see if we can do that. This healthy competition is not about beating our clients: it's ultimately about making them better.

5. Security that Scales with You

We are diversifying. Financial institutions, who we have been working with since 1981, have to be secure by law. But there's plenty of other organizations who really need our services, like law firms and small businesses. And we need to be able to offer a solution that can scale from a 20 person shop to a 200+ person shop. In 2019 we will be expanding to "semi-regulated" and unregulated markets.

Conclusion

"Vala" stands for strong, or authority, and "Secure" was chosen because we believe security is both an emotional state and a standard. I want us to be a high standard that when clients work with us they become "Vala Secure," a level beyond working with any old security company. We're excited to see what 2019 brings. Become Vala Secured!