Courion's Chris Zannetos 1:1 with Rake Narang, Info Security Products Guide

Rake Narang: How has Courion kept up with innovation? With so many solutions available, what are the critical points end-users must consider first?

Chris Zannetos: Much of Courion’s success can be attributed to our ability to anticipate customer needs, and deliver innovative solutions that help our customers quickly achieve measurable business results such as cost savings, improved service quality. For example, consider the business impact of Web 2.0, enterprise collaboration and virtualization. Along with the related productivity advantages, many of our customers are struggling with figuring out how to balance the business value of these new technologies, with new risk management and compliance challenges. Courion’s automated provisioning and access compliance solutions are flexible enough to help customers manage the new security and regulatory risks associated with these new virtualized and increasingly collaborative environments – as well as other new technologies we have yet to consider.

By focusing on current and emerging identity management challenges associated with security, audit and policy compliance – particularly around HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley – Courion delivers numerous ways to help customers achieve important business and risk management objectives. For most companies, compliance and risk management boils down to user access – making sure the right people have the right access to the right systems and applications when they need it, and not when they don’t. Because of the flexibility of Courion’s Enterprise Provisioning Suite, our customers can start with addressing what ever exposure risks are most critical to their organization. For some, it is establishing an automated approach to role creation and management. For others, it is rolling out self-service password management solutions. No matter where companies start down their provisioning and access compliance path, Courion can help complete the journey.

Rake Narang: Will the security vendors always be playing a catch-up game with hackers and attackers? How do you see the security products evolving 2-3 years from today? How is your company focusing on 2008 growth plans?

Chris Zannetos: Many security issues stem from the internal threats and policy compliance breaches resulting from orphaned, or out of use, accounts and infrequent or non-existent review of employee access. So, we help companies prevent against these internally-driven security threats and compliance breaches by making it easy to grant, manage and monitor appropriate access to enterprise resources. As a result of proper provisioning, security is clearly improved by limiting unnecessary access to sensitive data, cutting down on user “work-arounds” for access to non-provisioned, but needed, applications, and eliminating lags between changes in employee status and reflecting those changes in network rights. Security products will need to continue to address these insider threats, particularly in increasingly collaborative and virtualized work environments.

Courion solutions encompass the auditing and administrative tools necessary for risk management such as reporting; attestation; governance, risk and compliance (GRC); automated user and resource provisioning; and role management. We are also beginning to see the emergence and rapid adoption of new technologies that support virtualized and increasingly collaborative work environments. We help organizations take a proactive approach to managing the related compliance and security risks associated with these evolving work environments. Again, we do this by ensuring that that business managers and IT departments can easily manage and monitor the access being made available through virtualization or collaboration tools. And, helping them to determine if that access complies with business policy and industry regulations.

In terms of future growth, we are expanding both our direct and channel sales organizations. Courion launched its VAR channel program in October 2006 as an extension of the direct sales efforts. Courion's Authorized Resellers include both regional and national software and professional IT services providers who have been trained to sell and deliver Courion’s enterprise provisioning offerings. These organizations may combine Courion’s software with complementary offerings in access management, security, and network infrastructure to provide comprehensive solutions for their customers.

Courion actively seeks strategic relationships with leading technology providers such as EMC and Citrix that share our philosophies about identity management and its role in helping customers achieve their operational, compliance and security goals. With our technology partnerships, we are committed to delivering our customers access to the most integrated, innovative, end-to-end identity management solutions available on the market today.
Looking ahead, Courion expects increased customer demand for best of breed provisioning and access compliance solutions, and continued growth from new customer acquisitions and sharp increases in replacement deals. Companies that were failed by the ‘identity stack’ approach are now turning to Courion to deliver rapid business results. Courion is uniquely positioned to deliver tremendous value to all of our customers, setting the stage for more explosive growth through the rest of this year and into 2008.