Startup Aims to Automate Identity Compliance

A new software startup named Aveksa introduced its first product June 14 with the goal of helping companies automate IT authentication systems management and regulatory compliance work.

Labeled as Alexa Compliance Manager, the software promises to centrally monitor the operation of access management tools present in other IT systems and applications, and give companies the ability to automate many compliance-related tasks that previously demanded manual work by systems administrators.

A number of the tasks that Compliance Manager aims to help simplify revolve around the demands placed on businesses to provide and document segregation of duties among employees in order to comply with regulations including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act).

Using what it calls the “unified identity view,” or the centralized reports it can generate by pulling together information from different types of authentication systems, the vendor maintains that companies will also be able to eliminate a lot of redundant work needed to address different regulations.

Customers can take a “comply-once, cross-regulatory” approach to maintaining ID-related authentication operations, said Deepak Taneja, Aveksa’s founder and chief executive.

“The cost of compliance has been so high because companies have been forced to swallow regulations on project-by-project basis,” said Taneja.

“Our focus is on helping customers streamline their work and automate as much of the work as possible; this way they can make the work cheaper and more easily measured and tie it in more to organizational IT goals.”

Taneja, who previously served as the chief technology officer at ID management specialists Netegrity, which was acquired by CA in late 2004, said that Aveksa specifically wants to provide the layer of software used to monitor and automate all the technologies needed to establish compliance.

Such tools are in particularly high demand today based on the disparate, proprietary technologies being used by enterprises to meet regulatory demands, he said.

Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Startup Aims to Automate Identity Compliance