It's another month, and another edition of Inside The System. Our new series just got a fresh facelift - we did an interview with someone who knows all and everything about EU grants and not only that, he's created a platform that does AI powered search for the eligible tenders & grants based on your company profile, and even more, he and his team help to actually fill out the documentation so you can focus on whats important for you. And that's Edgars Poga, an ex-big four Senior consultant and now founder of Proposal Peak.
Proposal Peak landing page www.proposalpeak.com
But the talk we had wasn't really about grants, why I wanted to talk to Edgars was about something different. It was about security of such apps. Since you know that Affire has been on the mission on helping companies to discover Shadow IT, specifically shadow SaaS, we've also discovered that a lot of times our interpretation of what really is SaaS or shadow SaaS, is quite narrow, so we think Slack, Zoom, ChatGPT, online marketing SaaS tools, most of them being productivity tools for doing the work itself. However, in the process of building Affire and discovering the apps people use, we soon saw that many of the information is not just being uploaded or dispersed in apps you log-in or create an account, it's a lot of times application forms, surveys, and well... turns out now many of the application forms also now have applications to help you fill out the applications. (Wow, inception.. yeah, i hope you didn't get lost there, cause I did).
So when you hit that realisation, you start to go down a rabbit hole, and start to think - what else is out there? And with the AI adoption, and now everyone being able to create their own SaaS app quickly just by using, let's say Claude, it kind of becomes impossible to know what is out there, unless you track it real time and discover based on real-time data.
And when you realise the void is that big, then how do you make sure the apps being used in the shadows are secure?
Me and Edgars tackled exactly this part of such SaaS apps, just in the context of grant application SaaS, and we together tinkered the potential solutions of how to balance making sure the SaaS team uses (even if as shadow SaaS), is safe, how to evaluate the security of the service, what can the IT team or MSP provider do, and how does the market really look like for these types of tools when we talk about grants and tenders, cause this information includes company data that also uses financial data.
Our conclusions you can watch in the video, definetly an interesting talk to listen to. We concluded that it's a hybrid of educating the team on how to differentiate between secure, reliable SaaS, and IT teams also being on top of what is being used in the team behing closed doors. Do check out Proposal Peak, they take their client data security seriously, and all the best to them in their journey.
In the meantime, we at Affire continue to dig into the problem space, and see you next month!
Elvīra & your beloved Affire team 🔥
Watch the video here: