IBM has acquired Consul risk management, Inc., a privately-held software company headquartered in Delft, Netherlands with a principal office in Herndon, Virginia. Financial details were not disclosed. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and is anticipated to close in the first quarter of the 2007 calendar year. Upon approval, Consul will become part of IBM’s Tivoli software unit.
Consul is a provider of compliance and security audit software that helps clients track, report and investigate non-compliant behavior, such as unauthorised activity by IT administrators or other users.
Consul provides an “auditor-in-a-box” for compliance initiatives by using a single management technology dashboard. Consul’s monitoring and auditing capabilities cover a wide array of systems, applications and resources, including IBM’s mainframe environment. This technology complements IBM’s existing security information and event management capabilities to offer clients a portfolio of solutions that can monitor, audit and report on both users and technology.
The software monitors business compliance processes for compliance, automatically providing alerts when information or technology assets are at risk, when data is inappropriately accessed, or if compliance processes have been breached. Increasingly, security, risk, audit and compliance functions within companies are relying on business compliance technology to investigate abnormal activity or simply test whether they are compliant with government regulations.
“Consul is uniquely capable of rounding out the IBM portfolio to help clients more fully address compliance around access to private information to help reduce risk in their organizations,” says Al Zollar, the general manager of IBM Tivoli Software. “Together, IBM and Consul will be able to offer integrated security management and powerful user activity monitoring across the entire IT infrastructure from devices and systems to applications in both traditional and service oriented architectures.”
“With today’s high volume of compliance activity, auditors typically want to know that organizations have control of privileged user activities,” adds Joe Sander, the CEO of Consul. “Beyond knowing who has the right to access specific data, companies need to ensure that only appropriate individuals are doing so, without hindering business productivity. Consul software is one of the industry’s first solutions to address the intersection of audit and policy compliance efforts with information security and operational risk.”