7 River Systems is an all-remote cybersecurity company. They specialize in helping startups and rapidly growing small businesses tackle their cybersecurity challenges — everything from establishing policies and procedures to vulnerability testing.
Cybersecurity is one of the most challenging aspects of growing a business, so 7 River Systems has a steady stream of new clients. Since every new customer brings their own suite of tools, 7 River Systems wanted to build a standard way to integrate ClickUp — their own app of choice — with their clients’ tools.
Read on to discover how 7 River Systems uses Unito to better manage projects and collaborate with their clients.
The challenge: Safely navigating cybersecurity automation for clients in separate tool stacks
Working with clients who each have their own tool
When 7 River Systems works with a client on cybersecurity, they do so as a consultant. The two parties agree on specific projects to be tackled and the level of effort it will take to actually complete that work.
The projects themselves are collaborative. They involve members of the 7 River Systems team dealing closely with a client’s IT teams, systems administrators, and other employees.
Naturally, customers expect regular progress reports and access to key project information. 7 River Systems organizes and tracks these projects internally using ClickUp. They recently made the switch to ClickUp because it offered a simple way to roll up individual tasks into a digestible bird’s eye view of an entire project.
Since not all of their clients use ClickUp, the company has had to find ways to work with tools like Jira, Trello, and GitLab.
“We want to make sure that we play in their native environment,” explains Paul Pasquale, the founder of 7 River Systems. “It helps with collaboration. They prefer to use their system — and they should — for a number of security, compliance, and administrative reasons. It’s important that we integrate with their existing, internal business processes.”
Integrations that didn’t do enough
Since buying seats for his team in every client tool wasn’t an option, 7 River Systems tried two different approaches to working with client tools.
The first was to use native tool integrations or external integration tools like Zapier, but Pasquale said that they didn’t really get the job done: “They don’t provide constant updates, or capture fields like comments,” he says.
The second approach was to manually copy and paste updates between ClickUp and their clients’ tools.
“That is a pain. It takes a lot of time to do,” according to Pasquale. “We have a virtual assistant that would log into one tool, see what had changed in the last couple days and then go update the other tool.”
When projects move quickly and you want to keep clients in the loop, slow, manual updates just didn’t fit the bill.
The solution: real-time updates between ClickUp and the rest of their stack
A complete integration
What Pasquale needed was an integration solution that provided real-time, automatic, two-way updates across tools and covered all the fields he needed.
For that, he turned to Unito.
Thanks to Unito’s new ClickUp integration, 7 River Systems is able to quickly integrate their tool of choice with those of each new client.
Seamless flow of information
It’s as simple as building a one-to-one workflow between a project in either tool. Once the connection is made, any new task, any change to a due date or assignee, or any new comment will automatically be reflected in the other tool.
This allows the 7 River Systems team to update a project in ClickUp and have the information automatically reflected within the client tool — no copying and pasting required.
With this Unito integration, Pasquale was able to build a more standardized practice of how his team collaborated with clients — which is important for a cybersecurity business where compliance and record-keeping is vital.
The results: $900 USD and 9 hours saved each week
Real-time updates in all tools
With their Unito workflows in place, clients have access to progress updates in real-time from their tool of choice. According to Pasquale, this helps with accountability and customer confidence.
“They’re able to see what we’ve been doing on the spot, instead of waiting a couple of days,” he says. “More communication is always a good thing.”
More productive time
These workflows also have a direct impact on the amount of time the company can spend doing work for their clients instead of working around their tools.
Unito’s internal estimates of 7 River System’s usage (a combination of items in sync and users working with Unito workflows) calculates approximately 9+ hours and $900 USD saved per week in time that would otherwise be spent on manual upkeep between tools.
“The most tangible result is productivity,” Pasquale explains. “Most of our clients are on retainer so we have a set time budgeted for them. At the end of the day, we can now do more with what they’ve given us. We bring more value to them because we’re not eating time copying and pasting updates.”
Here’s a closer look at Unito’s Trello Jira integration
About 7 River Systems
7 River Systems is an all-remote cybersecurity company. They specialize in helping startups and rapidly growing small businesses tackle their cybersecurity challenges.
