Over the past several years, numerous vendors have gotten into the IT Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (IT-GRC) space. They’ve been driven there by customers who are seeking automation to help them achieve, sustain and prove compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, PCI and others. The best IT-GRC products are those that holistically look at an organization – not just IT automated controls. This helps assure alignment between IT and the overall corporate governance and risk management.

By virtue of its acquisition of BindView in 2005, Symantec has been in the IT-GRC space for a while. Now the company just released a new version of its Control Compliance Suite (CCS 9.0), and this release puts Symantec in the game. If you already use Symantec products, and you’re shopping for an IT-GRC solution, you owe it to yourself to look at CCS 9.0.

CCS 9.0 is an integrated suite of products providing compliance management services across multiple regulations and an architecture that is open to an assortment of technologies distributed throughout an enterprise. The main functionality to support an organization’s compliance requirements includes:

Policy Management Assessment and Reporting – With today’s multitude of regulations and compliance mandates, many organizations have to juggle numerous control objectives and policies to assure compliance. CCS Policy Manager help ease this burden in the following ways:

* Ships with sample / best practice policy templates to help organizations customize and map policies to specific regulations and governance needs.
* Automates the workflow associated with policy distribution, end user acceptance, and exceptions management.
* Identifies overlaps in control objectives, thus reducing redundant processes and assessment efforts.
* Collects evidence of compliance through integration with other CCS modules..
* Provides numerous visual dashboard tools and reports to assess policy compliance (and violations).

Access / Entitlement Management – Believe it or not, many organizations cannot easily determine which users have access to specific applications and regulated data. CCS 9.0 helps mitigate this challenge through its Entitlement Manager (EM) with the following functions:

Linda Musthaler is a principal analyst with Essential Solutions Corporation.