Courion Customer Poll Confirms Importance of Roles in Managing User Access; Organizations Extending Identity Management Initiatives Across Role Lifecycle Management, Audit and Segregation of Duties Compliance.

FRAMINGHAM, Mass. -- Courion(R) Corporation, the provisioning specialist, today announced key findings from interactive customer polling that took place during CONVERGE '06, the company's annual enterprise provisioning customer conference recently held in Boston. Attendees participated in 'live' polling during conference sessions at the two-day event by providing responses to questions about key issues and challenges.

The polling results represent provisioning and identity management trends across various company sizes and industries such as financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and others. Fifty-seven percent of customers participating in the polls represent organizations with 10,000 or more employees.

When asked about their organization's greatest technological barrier to provisioning, responses were almost evenly split between data consolidation, definition of roles, and having highly distributed users and systems. Sixty-four percent responded that defining roles is an essential prerequisite to implementing provisioning, with seventy-two percent believing that sixty-six-to-eighty percent of their user population can be represented by roles. The majority of respondents are using a 'hybrid' approach to role creation that includes both 'bottom-up' - starting with access rights users already have - and 'top-down' - identifying access rights required based on business function.

When asked about the most important result needed to justify their provisioning investments, sixty-six percent of the responses were evenly divided between compliance/risk management and business facilitation benefits.

Fifty-four percent of participants responded that they expect to receive business process improvement by discovering inefficient processes as a result of automating the process for segregation of duties (SoD) enforcement, while thirty-two percent are a quarter of the way or more through the process of automating policy management to the point where SoD compliance can be regularly audited and monitored.

When asked about best practice methodologies their organizations are undertaking today, thirty-two percent identified ITIL while twenty-one percent identified COBIT; eleven percent identified both. When participants were asked if their organizations found ITIL or COBIT to be beneficial to their risk management, governance, and compliance initiatives, sixty-four percent were not certain about ITIL, while sixty-two percent found COBIT to be beneficial. Thirty-two percent responded that their organizations are not using a best practice methodology.

"Senior level IT and information security executives from industry-leading companies that participated in the polling provided valuable insight on the realities of what is taking place inside their organizations in their efforts to extend identity management across other areas of their business," said Chris Zannetos, president and CEO, Courion. "With this understanding, Courion can continue to offer our customers best practices for determining the most effective, timely method of breaking through identity management barriers and delivering provisioning results more rapidly."

As proven by the polling results, roles have become an important tool for effectively managing user access. In order to help customers efficiently leverage roles and simplify security policy enforcement as part of their provisioning automation, Courion today announced the RoleCourier(TM) Role Management solution as the latest addition to the Courion Enterprise Provisioning Suite(TM) solution. RoleCourier delivers comprehensive role management including creation, modification, enablement/disablement, periodic review, and collaboration. RoleCourier provides automated role creation allowing organizations to create roles based on a set of similar users and supports enterprise, business and application-centric role definitions.

ABOUT COURION

Courion's rapid business impact approach enables organizations to avoid the pitfalls of traditional user provisioning and achieve lasting business value. By eliminating dependencies, prerequisites, and other barriers to provisioning success, Courion is able to address the specific business needs of customers and provide both extensibility and adaptability to the changes that are the reality of today's business environment. Powered by the industry's most flexible provisioning technology, Dynamic Community(TM) set-based Provisioning, Courion securely automates manual processes for user provisioning, audit and regulatory compliance, and password management. For more information, please visit our website at www.courion.com.

Courion is a registered trademark. Enterprise Provisioning Suite and Dynamic Community are trademarks of Courion Corporation. All other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.