Sun Microsystems and Deloitte Consulting LLP will join forces on February 21 to unveil their co-developed new CTGC (Center for Technology Governance and Compliance).
The physical- and virtual-based CTGC will provide customers with a framework to weave together Deloittes professional services with assorted Sun hardware and software to combat regulatory compliance demands.
As part of the CTGC collaboration, next week Sun and Deloitte Consulting will introduce their first physical location CTGC, based in Menlo Park, Calif.
Both companies are actively looking at the location of their second CTGC, which will be situated in New York City, according to Norbert Nowicki, partner executive for Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun.
Customers will be able to walk into physical CTGC facilities and access respective technology resources committed by Sun and Deloitte.
In the case of Sun, the systems vendor will donate IT management products and services associated with its ILM (information lifecycle management) and IM (identity management) portfolios.
Deloitte has already put some of its applications on Sun Solaris Servers as part of CTGC demos.
Deloitte will provide customers using the CTGC with specialized consulting and advisory services designed to extend the firms technology infrastructure expertise to soften regulatory compliance and governance hurdles.
For example, these services can include Deloittes insight towards auditing, taxes and document management, noted Lee Dittmar, principal, for Austin, Texas-based Deloitte Consulting LLC.
“A lot of companies are having trouble [responding to] compliance. If youre sitting on the customer side, it is frustrating and there are a lot of challenges to deal with,” said Dittmar.
“This isnt just an ivory tower effort … our mutual clients are confused and its going to be up to all of us to alleviate that confusion.”
Dittmar said that when necessary, third-party vendors will be made available to the virtual and physical CTGC to either respond to broad customer needs extending beyond Sun or Deloittes technology or as part of both companies overall strategy and technology roadmap.
The CTGC will incorporate methodologies to address four specific components: A technology assessment to firm up risk mitigation and establish practices for long-term governance; a security plan toward enabling access controls to lock down data; An information governance plan to classify, archive, retrieve and dissolve electronic records to meet regulatory mandates; and a controls initiative to offer visibility into enterprise compliance operations.
U.S. government regulations targeted by the CTGC include the HIPAA (Health Information Portability and Accountability Act), SEC 17a-4, and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.