When he is not working as a security analyst, Chijioke Okoye is building PurpleWASP, an all-in-one compliance management tool for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Other times, he is mentoring black professionals in the United Kingdom and in Ireland to transition into the cybersecurity industry. But these worlds and decades of experience often converge, positioning him to innovate with impact. After years in cybersecurity, Okoye discovered a gap in compliance regulations: the products built for automated compliance management were built for the big enterprises, while small businesses still navigated compliance manually.
When asked how he holds it all together, Okoye acknowledges, “It’s been daunting, but it’s also been actually very rewarding as well.” Especially winning the trust of the target market for PurpleWASP, “The application is basically from a new name, so people have that in the back of their mind, that they don’t know what to expect, which is very valid. But it started [something] for us to be able to prove ourselves in terms of ensuring that we try to correct some of those doubts.”
Mentorship initiatives
Okoye’s background runs through IT support and IT infrastructure. But his attachment to the cybersecurity field made him pivot. He said, “I’ve always had the hope of getting into the cybersecurity field. From the day I decided that, to the day I started doing actual work with cybersecurity, it took me about five to six years to get to that point. Because back in Nigeria, there wasn’t really any structured way of doing that.” So to give back, in 2021, Okoye committed to being an EC-Council Cybersecurity Career Mentor to provide career guidance to emerging cybersecurity professionals.
In one instance, an intending cybersecurity professional from a marketing background did not know where to begin, and Okoye stepped in. “[I] found out that he was coming from a marketing background, which means he had no prior idea or knowledge of [cybersecurity] itself. So I said, ‘…we’re going to backtrack a little bit,’ which is to go back and start learning things in the IT space. Then eventually, we transition into cybersecurity.” He also mentors with Cyblack, a group providing cybersecurity education to black professionals from Nigeria and Africa who come into the United Kingdom or Ireland. Through one mentorship at a time, Okoye is orchestrating ripples of change across the digital ecosystem.
Ecosystem builder
Okoye’s investment in the global cybersecurity ecosystem transcends one-on-one relationships to macro-scale awareness and education. Speaking as a panellist on Work-Life Balance/Integration at the CyBlack 2024 conference, Okoye stressed the need to find a work-life balance: “As cybersecurity professionals, we work way more than we know and are always strategising on ways to keep infrastructure secure, we sometimes forget to have lives of our own. The malicious attackers would always be there, and it is best to come up with a security roadmap, implement it, and trust the process.”
He also spoke at the Yorkshire Cyber Security Cluster (YCSC), where he spoke on ‘Building Experience Without Experience,’ and at the Digital Transformation Expo (DTX), where he keynoted two topics, “Hidden threats in your pipeline” and “Multi-cloud made manageable” from an Information/cybersecurity standpoint.
Now, with PurpleWASP, a next-generation Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) SaaS platform founded in 2025, he aims to solve compliance challenges for SMEs and create scalable solutions for risk and policy management with a granular approach. He notes, “Some tools out there are not granular to be able to allow organisations to customise them the way it suits the organisation or their organisation’s strategic goals and objectives. They build this thing, and want organisations to adjust their system to fit into what they built. But what we’re doing, in the sense, is that we’re actually taking this thing a step further by making it flexible enough for organisations to be able to modularise it in a way that they want, in a way that it fits their wider organisational goals.”
PurpleWASP’s comprehensive policy management tool allows you to create, distribute & track policies with industry-specific templates. It covers an entire policy lifecycle from drafting to review. For small businesses, they can protect themselves against legal risks, track evidence for regulators, and streamline their operations with access to the product. With PurpleWASP, Okoye is building intelligent systems for risk visibility, compliance automation, and operational excellence. Recently, the compliance product was selected for the DiSH Accelerator Program, designed to empower digital startups, validating its innovation potential and global growth trajectory.
“It was very enlightening, and we’re very excited to have been accepted into the program,” Okoye shares. “ It shows that people are actually acknowledging what we’re doing right, and that they see it as a potential.”
With the combined impact of his workforce, mentorship, and volunteering, Okoye envisions that his most lasting contribution to the digital ecosystem will be that his work outlasts him. He says, “I know that my experience that I have can be able to provide security, or at least, if not anything, resilience for businesses across the world.”
