SAP AG and CA Technologies announced they are collaborating as part of an effort to meet the latest demands to instill governance, risk and compliance (GRC) market within business and IT processes. Leveraging products from CA Technologies with leading GRC applications from SAP will allow IT executives to gain tighter control over their IT risk and compliance initiatives and focus on long-term value creation for the business.
The two companies will bring to bear enterprise IT management products from CA Technologies, combined with GRC solutions from the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio.
This combination will provide customers with continuous monitoring of IT control and risk metrics. "The output of these capabilities is a catalog of risk use cases that SAP provides in its Risk Management product," Thomas McHale, vice president of product management for CA, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "The use cases provide a full description of the risk and its impact on the business, and monitors key risk indicators from both SAP ERP and management products from CA Technologies. The SAP product provides risk heat maps, compliance reports and alerts generated from remediation workflows."
CA and SAP products in this space will continue to be sold separately, McHale adds. "But they have out-of-the-box risk use cases, with the appropriate product integration from CA Technologies provided with the SAP GRC Risk management and Process Control products."
The challenge is that managing GRC around IT processes covering areas such as security, availability, infrastructure and IT project management differs from GRC for business processes. As a result, enterprises face increased costs and labor efforts from having uncoordinated GRC initiatives, and may not be appropriately managing the key IT risks and controls that could cause significant business impact.
SAP's GRC solution set helps customers automate and standardize GRC activities with pre-defined workflow and reporting, and provide continuous monitoring of both IT and business controls. CA products focus is on continuously monitoring security, IT project and portfolio management, and assuring service performance. CA's portfolio includes CA Enterprise Log Manager, CA Clarity PPM, and CA Wily Application Performance Management, which can provide content for the SAP BusinessObjects Risk Management and SAP BusinessObjects Process Control applications to map into the IT and business frameworks. This also helps continuously monitor these frameworks so that risk and compliance issues can be identified and mitigated proactively before events occur.
There is also a role for CA-Unicenter in this offering, since the management and monitoring platform covers a wide breadth of enterprise systems, McHale says. "Risk and compliance issues apply to security, configuration management, asset management, service assurance, availability, performance, project management, and more. We'll be taking advantage of the wide range of IT information content that products from CA Technologies can provide."
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