IBM announced plans to acquire Consul Risk Management Inc., a firm
whose software tracks employee behavior and unauthorized access of
company records.
 | | | | | CISOs are tired of putting in
piecemeal solutions, so a lot of people are looking for product
suites as opposed to best of breed products that can do one thing
really well.
Khalid Kark,
senior analystForrester Research
Inc. |
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Financial details were not disclosed. Big Blue said that the
acquisition would become part of its Tivoli software unit.
Based in Delft, Netherlands, Consul develops compliance and
security audit software that businesses can use to track, report
and investigate employees, such as unauthorized activity by IT
administrators or other users.
Consul does a good job of aggregating information inside
different parts of an organization, an area that many businesses
have been trying to tackle to meet compliance mandates, said Khalid
Kark, a senior analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester
Research Inc.
"CISOs are tired of putting in piecemeal solutions, so a lot of
people are looking for product suites as opposed to best of breed
products that can do one thing really well," he said. "This is
going to really help round off the compliance insider threat piece
for IBM." @29577
Some vendors that compete with Consul are Network Intelligence,
a division of EMC, Reston, Va.-based Intellitactics Inc., and
Cupertino, Calif.-based ArcSight Inc. Consul may have stood out
because it works in mainframe environments, Kark said.
Consul software called Auditor-in-a-box is a dashboard manager
that scans company logs to monitor and audit systems and
applications. It can be set up to automatically provide alerts when
it finds that information or technology assets are at risk, when
data is inappropriately accessed, or if compliance processes have
been breached.
For example, IBM said the software can be used by a technology
company to detect when an unauthorized employee accesses a system
containing future product design concepts. An online retailer could
also use the software to be notified when an abnormally high number
of customer records are accessed.
The Consul software works in IBM's mainframe environment. It
enables easy user administration on the mainframe, IBM said.