Courion Unveils Microsoft SharePoint Compliance and Provisioning Preview at Burton Group Catalyst Conference

Business Wire, June 25, 2007

Demonstrates Capabilities to Help Organizations Balance Business Value and Risk Management in Collaborative Work Environments

SAN FRANCISCO -- Courion[R] Corporation, the provisioning experts for results-driven operations, today announced it will showcase the Courion Enterprise Provisioning Suite[TM] for Microsoft SharePoint[R] at this week's Burton Group Catalyst Conference 2007. This preview will demonstrate how Courion extends its proven access compliance and policy enforcement capabilities to new collaborative applications. Enterprise collaboration has the ability to re-shape traditional enterprise work environments, but it is also creating new security and data confidentiality risks that many organizations are unprepared to address.

"The market for enterprise collaboration tools will increase as organizations continue to seek the associated benefits of improved communication, content management and context driven information sharing," said Kevin Kampman, senior analyst, Burton Group. "However, without the proper framework to enforce procedures and discipline, the resulting shared workspaces can quickly become unmanageable, increasing the risk of sensitive content being disseminated outside of its intended audience. Courion demonstrates how organizations can establish risk-based governance and controls in these environments to ensure long term security and compliance with business policy and industry regulations."

With Courion's capabilities for SharePoint, line of business managers will benefit from a robust set of automated policy controls to better balance the value of collaborative work environments with the compliance concerns associated with shared resources. This is important as business managers are taking on greater responsibility for compliance with business policy and regulations such as HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley. As a result, they need to be able to answer questions associated with what data is being shared, who has access, who needs access, and who is ultimately responsible for managing the information.

Control Collaboration, Don't Inhibit It

Courion's approach to compliance and provisioning for enterprise collaboration is based on a flexible control framework that addresses specific levels of risk; a range of preventative and detective controls; and sample security policy templates to define risk-appropriate controls and settings. Key benefits of the automated Courion-SharePoint capabilities include allowing organizations to select an appropriate level of control based on their security policy; the ability to help organizations gain better visibility into where to apply business policy in SharePoint, and at what security or resource level (such as Site, Document Library or Document); and how to set up rules for collaboration and sharing. With Courion, SharePoint users will be able to improve security controls while reducing administrative costs, minimizing manual operations and improving employee productivity.

In a typical scenario, business mangers using the Courion solution for SharePoint can apply a set of controls - both preventative and detective - that are appropriate for different types of sites, such as those requiring low security needs (company softball team), medium security needs (internal project team) or high security needs (M&A team). With Courion, company representatives who want to set up a SharePoint site will be required to route that request through a pre-determined workflow that will ask the site requester a set of questions that determines what policy level (low, medium or high) the site will be set up with. Based on these policies, Courion provisions the site at the appropriate level of security.

Once the site is up, there is another set of automated, policy-driven workflows designed to ensure individuals only gain access to information that is relevant to their job. Consider a research company that is running a pharmaceutical clinical trial. There are various stakeholders in the project, such as lawyers, physicians or research associates, who require access to various data and information on the site. While a research associate may have pre-approved access to documents on the site associated with research policy or team discussions, if he requested access to trial results, he would be denied due to pre-determined, policy-driven workflows protecting against possible conflicts of interest. Instead, if the site had a low security threshold, like the company softball site, any one could opt-in to gain access. For higher security threshold sites, access requires one or more approvals by content owners before the user is granted access. Additionally, access can be taken away if it is determined an individual is out of compliance with business policies and regulations.

"While many organizations recognize the potential benefits of collaborative work environments such as Microsoft SharePoint, they also recognize the security concerns from a lack of governance and controls in this environment, which in turn stunts adoption," said Kurt Johnson, vice president of corporate development, Courion. "By automating provisioning and access requirements to SharePoint sites, Courion is helping companies balance the need for better information sharing, with the need for risk management and policy compliance - without impeding the business."