Startup Of The Week: AgilianceStartup Of The Week: Agiliance

Got risk? Of course you do. Public and private companies are besieged by security threats, PCI data security audits, and government regulations. Agiliance, which recently released the latest version of its governance, risk, and compliance software, helps companies quantify risk and deploy policies and controls to manage that risk.
--Andrew Conry-Murray AGILIANCE HEADQUARTERS: San Jose, Calif.

PRODUCT: Agiliance IT-GRC 3.0

PRINCIPALS: Patrick J. Conte, president and CEO; Pravin Kothari, founder and CTO; Debashis Ghoshal, VP of business development and global client services

INVESTORS: Walden International, Red Rock Ventures, Intel Capital

EARLY CUSTOMERS: E-Trade Financial, Bwin Interactive Entertainment AG

WHY TAKE A CHANCE ON YOU? The product automates much of the work that companies would otherwise have to do manually to evaluate their risk posture and demonstrate compliance. For companies that have to meet requirements of multiple regulations, the product can map individual controls to multiple regulations, which helps demonstrate compliance more quickly to auditors. OPPORTUNITY Companies have to comply with a host of government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA; standards frameworks such as COBIT and ISO; and industry mandates such as PCI. The requirements of such regulations span a variety of security and operational products, making it difficult for companies to tie together the necessary information to demonstrate compliance. Agiliance aggregates data from disparate systems and provides reports and dashboards to streamline the process. THE BRAINS CEO Conte has held executive positions at several startups, including Topspin, which was acquired by Cisco Systems. Founder and CTO Kothari was ArcSight's founding VP of engineering. HOW IT WORKS IT-GRC comes as an appliance or software. The product imports data about key assets, including servers and applications, from sources such as vulnerability assessment tools, security event management software, and configuration management databases. It then maps these assets to relevant standards and regulations. For instance, a company may run checks to ensure that its database servers meet PCI requirements. An executive dashboard provides summary views of the enterprise's risk and compliance scores. TIMELINE