eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
IBM invigorated its information governance product line Feb. 3 with monitoring and data protection software and services aimed at improving the overall quality of business data for enterprises.
IBM’s two new software products, InfoSphere Business Information Monitor and Optim Data Redaction, are designed to help enterprises better manage the access and use of their information.
IT governance is a subset of so-called corporate governance that focuses on risk management in IT systems. The increasing interest in IT governance is due mostly to compliance initiatives, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the United States and Basel II in Europe.
Although the two are related, IT governance is not the same as MDM (master data management), which involves the concept of a “master file” for each piece of data. MDM is similar to virtual or federated database management.
IBM is busy in this sector. Earlier the same day, the company announced the acquisition of data integrity software provider Initiate Systems.
“As information flows through an organization, there are many points at which disruptions in quality, protection and management can occur,” Michael Curry, IBM’s director of strategy for information management, told eWEEK. “Information governance provides the framework to ensure that information can be trusted and creates a solid foundation upon which other technologies can be based.”
InfoSphere Business Information Monitor, which IBM put together from its own research and from the November 2009 acquisition of Guardium, tracks the quality and flow of an organization’s information and provides real-time alerts about potential flaws. Guardium’s technology specializes in real-time enterprise database monitoring and protection.
For example, if a health insurance company were analyzing profit margins across different product lines (individual, group, HMO, Medicare), InfoSphere Business Information Monitor could immediately alert decision makers when a data feed from a specific geography was not being integrated into the total picture.
Optim Data Redaction protects an organization’s information by automatically recognizing and removing sensitive content from documents and forms.
“In using Optim Data Redaction, for example, a finance company could keep a customer’s credit scores in a loan document digitally blacked out from the view of an office clerk, while still being visible to a loan officer,” Curry told eWEEK.
The new software is available now. For more information, go here.