Tools Aim to Ease Compliance Burden

Several vendors, including OpenPages Inc., Intradyn Inc. and Paisley Consulting, are readying new tools that will let users more easily control data discovery and retention and enable the removal of unnecessary content to ease multifaceted regulatory compliance hurdles.

This month, OpenPages will roll out its Optimum Risk Management product. The software tool reduces compliance management costs by tracking key risk indicators that rise to a specified level of significance, either individually or collectively, said officials of the Waltham, Mass., company.

Following that, by the middle of next year, OpenPages will release its Optimum IT Governance product. OpITG extends risk assessment with integrated continuous monitoring and testing tools by adding an object type, which is a resource. The resource can be hardware or software or a mix of both, or specific people in roles designed to enforce IT codes of behavior, said officials.

In light of federal regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, customers such as Paul Veeneman, chief technology engineer for Minneapolis-based Hawkins Inc., said data must be accounted for at all times.

"Its amazing the level of information transferring through e-mails from 10 years ago. We probably do 3,000 to 4,000 inbound and outbound in e-mail a day," said Veeneman, whose chemical manufacturing company must comply with regulations from government agencies such as the Federal Drug Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Transportation. "For us to be able to retrieve [required] information saves us from some of the consequences we wouldve been opened to in months past."

Veeneman is running Intradyns new ComplianceVault06 e-mail archiving appliance for his business units Exchange Server environment. Last week, Intradyn announced two models of its product, 2U (3.5-inch) and 3U (5.25-inch) rack-mount hardware platforms featuring RAID protection, said officials of Intradyn, also in Minneapolis.

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Paisley Consulting this week will unveil its Risk Navigator 2.0 platform, which is based on J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) and features a new risk assessment functionality. The new capability has three methodologies: vertical risk assessment to drill down into organizational structure, a process-level-based horizontal risk assessment commonly used in internal audits and diagonal risk assessment focused on organizational objectives, said Tim Welu, CEO of Paisley, in Cokato, Minn.

Early next year, Paisley will release another module for Risk Navigator 2.0 to track policies and regulations for general compliance. The software will highlight responsibility for general compliance on a global basis by offering a common set of languages and definitions.

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