Deliver Your News to the World

IBM Governance and Risk Management Initiatives Help Secure and Optimize Clients’ Business Operations


WEBWIRE

Unveils Solutions for Resilient Operations with Clearer Insight into Data, Assets and Security.

ARMONK, NY.- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled new technologies and services to target the growing IT governance and risk management market, which is expected to exceed $30 billion by 2008.*

As government and industry groups impose an increasing number of regulatory demands related to data privacy, security and business resilience, organizations are realizing that it is critical to effectively implement IT governance mandates, outlining IT performance objectives and implementing risk management strategies to limit the impact of security threats and improve business resilience.

IT governance and risk management is quickly rising to the top of the agenda for global business leaders. Recent IBM surveys reveal that 79 percent of CFOs indicated they will adopt governance structures to integrate information and deliver business insight within the next three years, while 64 percent of CIOs see security compliance and data protection as one of the most significant challenges facing IT organizations.

IBM’s approach to helping clients mitigate risk and enable effective IT governance is aimed at starting with a client’s most strategic IT initiatives and providing improved business alignment, visibility and control throughout the IT lifecycle. IBM’s focus is on improving business performance and resilience by helping to optimize service management, business continuity and security.

IBM also has added several governance and risk management capabilities through recent acquisitions including Internet Security Systems, Consul, FileNet and Micromuse.

“As the nervous system of the business, IT must adapt dynamically as business service demands change -- delivering quickly on new requirements and responding to new threats,” said Alan Ganek, CTO of IBM Governance & Risk Management and IBM Tivoli Software. “Successfully implementing IT governance and risk management as a lifecycle is critical as businesses today are facing increasing globalization, staggering regulatory complexity and an ever-evolving security threat landscape. IBM provides leadership in self-managing autonomic capabilities combined with an experience-based approach and methodology that enables clients to run resilient, high performance, compliant businesses.”

The Philadelphia Stock Exchange uses IBM technology and services to address challenges in IT governance and risk management.

“It is absolutely critical for a national stock exchange to be secure, compliant with industry requirements and flexible enough to adapt to changing conditions,” said, Bernie Donnelly, vice president of quality assurance, Philadelphia Stock Exchange. “Working with IBM, we’ve developed and deployed an IT governance and risk management strategy that automates our compliance monitoring, auditing and reporting, which is critical to ensure that our business is operating smoothly, and that we are protected from unwanted electronic intruders, both externally and internally.”

Building on the industry’s broadest portfolio of services and technology offerings, IBM unveiled the following new capabilities to address clients’ challenges to optimize business performance and resilience by enabling more effective IT governance and risk management.

Governing IT Across An Organization

The Business of IT Dashboard, a suite of asset-based services, is designed to help clients assess their current strengths and weaknesses in critical areas of IT governance and risk management, and synchronize IT performance with the performance of the business. Unlike other IT monitoring tools, which typically offer only limited visibility into individual systems, the Business of IT Dashboard services and software (based on IBM Tivoli Netcool technology) offer complete views tailored for different classes of users, both inside and outside the IT organization. It helps clients assess, plan, design, implement and manage real-time applications that enable them to monitor and ensure that IT activities and performance link directly to delivering business performance and results. The dashboard can also help clients align IT investments with business priorities and requirements, increase IT process automation to drive effectiveness, and recognize and manage security risks.

IT Lifecycle Management and Governance Services for Tivoli service desk helps clients quickly and seamlessly deploy comprehensive service desk solutions that are designed to unify support processes, create a single point of contact for IT issues, make business reporting more accessible, and establish key performance indicators. The service desk often represents the only interface between the IT organization and end users, making it crucial to create a unified and integrated process.

Making Informed Decisions with Improved Service Management

The new Tivoli Business Service Manager software enables effective decision making by providing business and operations staff with real-time visibility into the health and performance of critical business services. This software is the first fully integrated product from the Micromuse acquisition, combining Netcool/Realtime Active Dashboards and Tivoli Business Systems Manager. Tivoli Business Service Manager provides an advanced view of the various services and processes across the organization with real-time service scorecards and key performance indicators. Operations staff can see the real-time status of individual devices or systems, as well as transaction failures, process bottlenecks, changes in normal revenue volume and more.

Managing Security Threats In Real-Time

The IBM Tivoli Security Operations Manager v4.1 is a security event management platform that provides a real-time dashboard designed to help organizations keep their computer networks and systems up and running despite security threats from malicious outsiders, employees or contractors. The software autonomically analyzes data from throughout the IT infrastructure to detect security threats, optimizing and automating the process of incident recognition, investigation and response. It enables the monitoring and enforcement of network security policies and IT control measures, helping users to quickly understand and mitigate threats and policy violations before they turn into incidents, while also providing operational and compliance focused reports.

Balancing Investment Across the IT Service Lifecycle

IBM Rational Portfolio Manager v.7.1 is an enterprise project management solution that can be used by everyone in an organization -- CIO, project managers, business analysts, developers -- to balance IT investments and identify service priorities. A new Web 2.0 interface allows team members to manage their work, submit time and expense reports, and a tight integration between Rational Portfolio Manager and IBM’s Rational portfolio helps ensure software projects are conceived, built, tested, deployed and provisioned on schedule. An analytical component to Rational Portfolio Manager enables automated decision and approval cycles for software development teams while finding trends and overlaps in projects. Project teams can increase efficiency with new templates and best practices that generate compliance reports and ease project start up.

In 2007, IBM also has unveiled several technologies and services to address the need for advanced IT governance and risk management solutions. These include:

-- The Business of IT Workshop;

-- advances in System z™ mainframe security architecture;

-- a business partnership with Cisco to provide emergency crisis response capabilities for the first time as an end-to-end managed service;

-- digital video surveillance services;

-- an expanded IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS) intrusion prevention system line and Managed Security Services portfolio with new service products for small and medium businesses;

-- IBM FileNet P8 4.0 Enterprise Content Management software platform; and,

-- new IBM System Storage offerings to better manage information growth, control costs or preserve information for data governance or compliance.

Further detail on IBM’s strategy and these governance and risk management technologies and services can be found online at http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/presskit/21544.wss.



WebWireID36199





This news content was configured by WebWire editorial staff. Linking is permitted.

News Release Distribution and Press Release Distribution Services Provided by WebWire.