Computerworld Honors Courion Customer with 'Premier 100 IT Leaders' Award

FRAMINGHAM, Mass., Jan. 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Courion® Corporation, leaders in access governance, provisioning, and compliance, today announced that customer Scott Ranson, CIO of Brookdale Senior Living, has been named one of Computerworld's Premier 100 IT Leaders for 2010. The annual award honors men and women who have a shared commitment to pursuing innovative strategies, while continuing business operations and sustaining employee loyalty.

Brookdale Senior Living is one of the largest owners and operators of senior living communities in the United States. Computerworld selected Ranson for the award based on the technology strategies he applied to deal with an influx of new employees associated with several mergers and acquisitions. A key component of Ranson's strategy was to implement Courion's Access Assurance Suite to automate the identity and access management process, which enabled Brookdale to improve business efficiencies and reduce overall IT spending by $150,000.

"Each year we honor IT leaders that really stand above the rest," said Scot Finnie, editor in chief of Computerworld. "The top 100 represents only those men and women who took the time and the effort to determine the right technologies that will improve their overall business efficiencies in both the short and long term."

Brookdale adopted Courion's Access Assurance Suite over a year ago to support IT challenges associated with the organization's 400% growth following three years of mergers and acquisitions. With Courion's identity and access management solution, Ranson was able to automate Brookdale's time-consuming manual user provisioning and access management procedures for new employees, while also simplifying compliance processes. In total, the time required for access changes was reduced from three to five days to less than 24 hours.

"It's no surprise to us that Scott was selected for this award. He understood that manual identity and access management would not scale with the growth of his organization, so he did his research and chose a solution that would deliver significant cost savings and productivity gains," said Chris Sullivan, vice president of customer solutions, Courion. "The commitment and dedication he demonstrated to his team and organization should be admired and commended."

Courion's unique Access Assurance approach to identity, access and compliance management ensures that only the right people have the right access to the right resources and are doing the right things. Access Assurance unifies Access Governance, Access Provisioning and Access Compliance in the most complex, heterogeneous environments. This comprehensive approach increases operational efficiency and transparency, strengthens security, and improves compliance, while delivering the industry's fastest time to value and lowest total cost of ownership.

About Computerworld

Computerworld is the leading source of technology news and information for IT influencers worldwide. Computerworld's award-winning Web site ( www.computerworld.com ), weekly publication, focused conference series and custom research form the hub of the world's largest (40+ edition) global IT media network. In the past five years alone, Computerworld has won more than 100 awards, including Folio Magazine's 2006 Gold EDDIE Award for the best technology/computing magazine, the 2004 and 2006 Magazine of the Year Award, and 2006 Best Overall Web Publication from the American Society of Business Publication Editors (ASBPE). In addition, in 2007 Computerworld's then editor in chief Don Tennant received the prestigious Timothy White Award from American Business Media. Computerworld leads the industry with an online audience of over 2 million unique, monthly visitors and a print audience of 1,222,000 readers each week (IntelliQuest CIMS Spring 2007).

About Courion

Courion's award-winning Access Assurance solutions are used by more than 400 organizations and over nine million users worldwide to quickly and easily solve their most complex identity and access management (password management, provisioning, and role management), risk and compliance challenges. Courion's business-driven approach results in unparalleled customer success by ensuring users' access rights and activities are compliant with policy while supporting both security and business objectives.  For more information, please visit our website at www.courion.com, our blog at blog.courion.com/, or on Twitter at twitter.com/Courion.

To view this release online, go to: http://www.courion.com/company/press_release.html?id=567

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SOURCE Courion Corporation