Approva Announces Release of Certification Manager
New Product Automates Process for Quarterly Review & Certification of User Access Privileges
September 30, 2008 - Reston, VA
Approva Corporation, the leader in controls intelligence software, today announced the release of Certification Manager™. This new product, which is the latest addition to the Approva Controls Intelligence Suite, automates the end-to-end process for reviewing and certifying user access rights across all business applications.
“With auditors requiring sign off from senior management to certify that effective internal controls are in place, companies are looking for ways to simplify the highly complex process of aggregating and reviewing user access information across their business environments,” said, Senior Security, IS Manager of one of the nation’s largest food and beverage companies. “As a beta customer, we are extremely pleased with the performance of Approva Certification Manager and think it will be a great addition to our Approva product suite. The largest benefit of Certification Manager is that it compiles detailed user access information from multiple applications and processes across the organization. This saves precious time and minimizes operational risk by ensuring we maintain appropriate access rights across the company.”
Without Approva Certification Manager, companies must rely on manual, e-mail or spreadsheet based processes to certify that appropriate roles and responsibilities are assigned to individual users. IT managers must prepare summaries of access rights for management review and then sift through an array of emails and spreadsheets which often contain erroneous information. This time-consuming and error prone process includes convoluted e-mail trails between IT and management that make it difficult to track progress and demonstrate to auditors that effective controls are in place. This manual effort typically costs large companies over hundreds of hours of labor and costs tens of thousands of dollars that is not sustainable in the long term. The expected ROI for the investment is expected to be within less than four months.
Approva’s Certification Manager makes periodic user access reviews a straightforward exercise by automating the review and approval process across both ERP systems and all other business applications. The product has been designed to make it very easy for managers to quickly approve or reject access rights for their employees. All actions are tracked and retained to facilitate sign off by senior management that effective internal controls are in place and provide evidence to auditors that access rights are being appropriately reviewed.
Certification Manager is compatible with Approva’s Authorizations Insights for SAP, Oracle, and PeopleSoft and can also be purchased as a standalone product.
“Automating user access reviews and certification is a fundamental component of effective user access management” said Approva SVP of Products and CTO, Steve Elliott. “Certification Manager is evidence of our continued commitment to work collaboratively with our customers to develop and deliver innovative products that address their most acute business pains. With Certification Manager, companies can now reduce their risk profile by automating what has been a time-consuming and disruptive quarterly process.”