Discover how a global private equity firm addressed a lack of portfolio wide visibility into cybersecurity risk by implementing CyberView™ as a standardized assessment and reporting capability. By establishing a common controls baseline and centralized reporting model, the firm gained consistent, defensible insight into cyber maturity and risk across its portfolio. The result was improved governance, reduced operational friction, and a scalable foundation for ongoing oversight.
Client Profile
A large global private equity firm with more than 90 portfolio companies spanning multiple industries, geographies, investment desks, and regulatory environments.
Challenge
The private equity firm faced a significant visibility gap across its portfolio. While individual portfolio companies had conducted cybersecurity assessments and aligned to industry-standard frameworks in the past, the firm lacked a meaningful way to aggregate, visualize, or compare cyber maturity and risk across the portfolio.
Key challenges included:
- Zero consolidated visibility into cyber maturity and risk across portfolio companies
- Assessment results existed only as static, point in time reports, often summarized manually in various reporting formats
- No common dashboard or data model to understand portfolio level trends, systemic risk, or outliers
- No standardized control baseline, with portfolio companies aligned to different frameworks, certifications, and regulatory regimes depending on geography and industry
- No centralized view of security tooling, controls coverage, or maturity differences across investment desks and markets
- Growing concern from leadership related to governance, defensibility, and repeatability, particularly in the context of regulatory scrutiny, diligence, and ongoing fiduciary oversight
As the portfolio expanded, these issues compounded. The firm recognized that without a scalable and standardized approach, cyber risk would remain opaque, costly to assess, and difficult to govern at the firm level.
Solution
The firm engaged Ankura to design and implement CyberView™ as the foundation for the company’s cybersecurity program, purpose built to deliver consistent, repeatable, and portfolio-wide cyber risk visibility.
Ankura worked with the firm and outside counsel to establish a common controls baseline leveraging the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 and the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Critical Security Controls 18 v8.1 as the core standards. This approach was intentionally selected because it broadly aligns with the majority of portfolio company requirements, including organizations operating under the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27001, System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2, the Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST), the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS), and other regional or industry specific frameworks and certifications.
Using CyberView’s many-to-many control mapping, Ankura was able to:
- Normalize assessment data across disparate frameworks and maturity levels
- Identify commonalities, gaps, and risk concentrations regardless of a portfolio company’s existing alignment
- Produce consistent maturity and risk outputs without forcing portfolio companies into a one size fits all compliance model
Ankura initially conducted second generation CyberView assessments for more than 30 portfolio companies, feeding structured assessment data directly into a centralized Power Business Intelligence (BI) dashboard. This provided the firm, for the first time, with:
- A single source of truth for cyber maturity and risk
- Portfolio level and investment desk level visibility
- Comparable insights across geographies and markets
The program was strategically planned as a two-year engagement that included quarterly follow up assessments, allowing the firm to track progress, regression, and emerging risk trends over time. As a result, the firm now maintains active cyber maturity visibility across more than 50% of its portfolio, with a clear pathway for remaining portfolio companies to opt into the program.
A critical design choice was the use of Microsoft Power BI for dashboarding. This approach:
- Eliminated the need for additional third party cyber governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) or dashboarding platforms
- Avoided introducing new vendor due diligence and data security risk
- Leveraged tooling already approved and widely used across the firm and its portfolio companies
Observations and Key Insights
Several important insights emerged during implementation:
- Fragmentation, not capability, was the primary challenge. Many portfolio companies had reasonable to enhanced security practices, but without a common framework and aggregation model, leadership could not see or trust the full picture.
- Manual aggregation does not scale. PowerPoint based rollups were time intensive, error prone, and quickly outdated, making them unsuitable for ongoing governance.
- Framework diversity is inevitable in global portfolios. CyberView’s mapping approach allowed the firm to embrace this reality rather than attempt to eliminate it.
- Technology minimization mattered. Avoiding additional tools reduced friction, accelerated adoption, and removed a common barrier for portfolio companies.
- A quarterly cadence drove behavior change. Regular, lightweight reassessments reinforced accountability and kept cybersecurity visible to leadership without overwhelming portfolio company teams.
Results and Impact
CyberView transformed the firm’s approach to cyber governance by delivering:
- Portfolio wide visibility into cyber maturity and risk for the first time
- Standardized, repeatable assessments aligned to NIST Cybersecurity Framework and CIS, with cross framework mapping
- Customizable dashboards showing maturity, risk, and trends by portfolio company and investment desk
- Reduced assessment and reporting overhead through automation and reuse of data
- Lower third-party risk exposure by avoiding additional platforms and leveraging Microsoft native tooling
- A scalable operating model proven across more than 30 portfolio companies and expandable to the full portfolio
- A sustainable, multi-year capability supporting ongoing regulatory, diligence, and governance needs
Estimated ROI
While the firm did not quantify exact dollar savings, based on Ankura’s experience and the information provided, a conservative estimated return on investment (ROI) range for the CyberView program is 300%-600% over two years.
This estimate is driven by:
- Elimination of duplicative and ad hoc assessments across portfolio companies
- Significant reduction in manual aggregation, reporting, and executive briefing preparation
- Avoidance of additional cyber GRC or dashboarding technology costs
- Reduced external vendor due diligence effort and associated legal and security review
- Improved prioritization of remediation spend, reducing wasted or misaligned security investments
Importantly, while the cost per portfolio company remained relatively low, the value of improved governance, risk visibility, and maturity uplift increased as participation expanded across the portfolio.
Conclusion
By implementing CyberView™, the private equity firm moved from fragmented first generation cybersecurity assessments to a scalable, defensible, and repeatable cyber governance program. The result is sustained portfolio wide insight, reduced cost and complexity, and greater confidence in managing cyber risk across a diverse and growing investment landscape.
© Copyright 2026. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of Ankura Consulting Group, LLC, its management, its subsidiaries, its affiliates, or its other professionals. Ankura is not a law firm and cannot provide legal advice.
