EMC Unifies eGRC Strategy To Help Organizations Transform Their Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance Programs

HOPKINTON, Mass., Feb. 1, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced its enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance (eGRC) strategy designed to help organizations become more agile, gain greater visibility into their data, and drive a trusted operational framework across the enterprise. Supported by a new set of EMC advisory services that balance business risk and responsiveness, EMC's eGRC strategy includes an open platform, technology solutions, an active user community and partners to provide a holistic view of an organization's total risk and compliance profile.

Enabling this transformation, the company also announced the next-generation of its award-winning RSA® Archer® eGRC management platform to support cross functional collaboration across the IT, operations, legal and finance domains. This open platform unifies EMC's eGRC portfolio allowing organizations to adapt their solution requirements, build additional applications and integrate with existing systems without touching a single line of code.

EMC defines eGRC as an organization's ability to manage enterprise risk and compliance issues as closely related strategic initiatives that have a direct impact on business objectives -- whether in a physical, virtual or cloud-based environment. Successful governance requires clear definitions of the business objectives and applicable regulations, policies, procedures and standards that best define the program. Managing risk requires identification, prioritization and remediation to protect the enterprise from excessive risk while removing barriers to growth. Demonstrating compliance requires the ability to prove adherence to laws, regulations, policies, contractual obligations and industry standards.

"The risks organizations must manage continue to become more complex and intertwined every day," said Pat Gelsinger, president and chief operating officer, EMC Information Infrastructure Products. "Financial conditions are changing more rapidly. Business operations are more dispersed and evolving. Legal and compliance mandates are becoming more stringent globally. And the more pervasive use of technology in all business functions creates more complex interrelationships which make securing and managing digital information more critical and challenging than ever. Customers are looking for partners who can provide broad sets of solutions that help them manage these inter-related risks in more coordinated ways. EMC is uniquely positioned with the technologies and expertise to help customers create more strategic and effective processes and systems for managing business risk across physical, virtual and cloud environments."

EMC's Four Solution Areas for Building an eGRC Strategy

Leveraging a common management platform, the best-in-industry eGRC content library, EMC's broad product and consulting services portfolio and third party product integrations, EMC's eGRC strategy incorporates four primary solution areas.  These solutions enable organizations to break down silos and deliver to senior executives a single view of their organization's risk and compliance posture. They also provide a foundation for assuring compliance in increasingly-virtualized data centers, as well as extending that compliance posture to the cloud, as customers increasingly consume IT resources from cloud providers. EMC will continue to deliver new content, integrations and business solutions in four key areas.

1. Business Solutions – eGRC Business Solutions enable organizations to quickly build an efficient, integrated and collaborative eGRC program across IT, finance, operations and legal domains, gaining visibility into Enterprise Risk Management, Audit Management, Vendor Management, and Policy and Compliance Management initiatives.
2. Information Governance – EMC's Information Governance solutions help customers gain visibility into their information, manage information-based risk, simplify eDiscovery, adhere to compliance mandates, and reduce costs. These modular solutions make information governance actionable and are designed to address organizations' most pressing pain points today and expand over time to support an information governance strategy.
3. Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery - EMC's Enterprise Business Continuity solutions provide a centralized, automated approach to business continuity and disaster recovery planning, allowing you to respond swiftly in crisis situations to protect your ongoing operations and improve the availability of key business systems.
4. Advanced Security Management - RSA's Advanced Security Management solutions enable the office of the CISO to visualize information security risk and run more efficient security operations. This collection of solutions and services combines the RSA Archer eGRC Platform with technologies covering security information and event management, data loss prevention, fraud awareness and other critical aspects of the IT security operations function.

"In order to increase collaboration, reduce uncertainty in business and produce more predictable results, senior executives must understand and acknowledge the interrelationships among governance, risk and compliance -- and be committed to having these processes work in harmony," said customer John Sapp, director, Product Development Standards, Security, Risk & Compliance, McKesson Corporation. "A common management platform has allowed us to go from a tactical, reactive approach to a proactive, value-added business approach."  

"Enterprises operate in an increasingly globalized business environment, in which they have to meet regulatory requirements of many jurisdictions, and manage risk on a global scale. This makes it imperative to have a clear eGRC strategy," said Graham Titterington, principal analyst, Ovum. "In recent Ovum research that was commissioned by EMC we found widespread concern that eGRC activities are consuming increased resources coupled with 98 percent of respondents acknowledging eGRC becoming increasingly more complex. EMC's breadth and depth of eGRC strategy and solutions makes it a strong partner for helping organizations solve their global eGRC initiatives."

EMC Consulting Services

EMC Consulting announces an expanded portfolio to assist organizations with building and implementing sustainable and cost-effective eGRC programs to enable a centralized view into business risk and compliance across the enterprise. Leveraging its worldwide expertise to deliver eGRC strategies, architectures and solutions to more than half of the Global Fortune 500 organizations, EMC Consulting is driving business-focused eGRC program design and execution for its customers built on unparalleled understanding of the EMC and RSA product portfolio.

Expanded eGRC Advisory Services include:

• GRC Strategy, Maturity Assessment and Roadmap services help clients build GRC programs that increase visibility, accountability and efficiencies across the organization.
• GRC program implementation services leveraging the RSA Archer eGRC platform helps clients manage risk and demonstrate compliance to laws, regulations, policies, and contractual obligations for critical enterprise processes such as cloud computing, information governance, security management and business continuity.

RSA's Archer eGRC Platform

All elements of the eGRC product portfolio will leverage the next-generation RSA Archer eGRC management platform that allows business units to work together using common processes and information. This platform approach allows organizations to have centralized views into enterprise risk, automated and repeatable business processes, integrated systems, and information as well as flexibility to evolve as business needs change.

Key platform enhancements include:

• Better visibility into operational risk
• Refined audit management
• Updated globalization/internationalization
• Advanced search and reporting
• Improved analytics through updated formula building and calculation engine
• Enhanced user interface
• New visual workflow builder
• Updated integration with third parties (data in/data out) with the Archer Data Feed and Publication Manager

Archer eGRC Community

The active and vocal Archer eGRC Community of more than 5,000 eGRC professionals leverage collaboration among clients, partners and product experts. Members actively share ideas, vote for product enhancements, and discuss trends that help guide the RSA Archer product roadmap. The latest release of the platform incorporates over 200 enhancements driven by this community, including a new user interface, enterprise performance and scalability, internationalization/globalization, and third party integrations.

EMC Partners

EMC fosters a community of technology partners and system integrators that build and deliver solutions enabling organizations to automate complex eGRC processes as well as integrate third party data into eGRC environments based on an open, common management platform.

About EMC

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world's leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their information. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.

EMC, RSA and RSA Archer are registered trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

This release contains "forward-looking statements" as defined under the Federal Securities Laws. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including but not limited to: (i) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (ii) delays or reductions in information technology spending; (iii) our ability to protect our proprietary technology; (iv) risks associated with managing the growth of our business, including risks associated with acquisitions and investments and the challenges and costs of integration, restructuring and achieving anticipated synergies; (v) fluctuations in VMware, Inc.'s operating results and risks associated with trading of VMware stock; (vi) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures and new product introductions; (vii) the relative and varying rates of product price and component cost declines and the volume and mixture of product and services revenues; (viii) component and product quality and availability; (ix) the transition to new products, the uncertainty of customer acceptance of new product offerings and rapid technological and market change; (x) insufficient, excess or obsolete inventory; (xi) war or acts of terrorism; (xii) the ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees; (xiii) fluctuating currency exchange rates; (xiv) litigation that we may be involved in; and (xv) other one-time events and other important factors disclosed previously and from time to time in EMC's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. EMC disclaims any obligation to update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.

SOURCE EMC Corporation