SailPoint charts compliance waters

SailPoint Technologies is a new company that on Tuesday will announce software designed to help enterprises reduce business risk and become complaint by better understanding identity data.

Founded by former WaveSet executives, SailPoint aims to add another dimension to identity management with Compliance IQ, which provides business context to the information generated by IT systems that report on which users have access to what data, says Mark McClain, CEO of SailPoint.

Using data mining and analytics, Compliance IQ combines information such as employees’ and contractors’ job functions, risk levels, and corporate policies with data generated by IT systems regarding access to give companies and their auditors a better view into compliance and risk, says McClain.

The software also generates an identity risk scorecard on each user based on their access to critical applications and information to assess their risk and measure their compliance. “We’re helping companies get a really good handle on who has access to what, and managing the business risk by associating what’s going on in IT with what the business wants to go on,” says Kevin Cunningham, SailPoint’s president.

Key features of the software are policy enforcement to centrally manage and define access policies; activity monitoring to track potential compliance risks; access certification and remediation to periodically review user access privileges; and forensic analysis for snapshots of users privileges and activities at a given point in time.

Compliance IQ works with popular identity management systems but doesn’t require them to function. The software will be available in March, pricing has not yet been announced. IDC predicts the market for identity and access management compliance will reach US$2 billion by 2010, according to SailPoint.

The company, based in Austin, was founded in 2005 but is being officially launched on Tuesday. It has raised $14 million in venture capital.