Prevalent Networks Debuts 'Policy Portal'

Blurring the line between VAR and vendor, Warren, N.J.-based Prevalent Networks debuted its own policy portal, aimed at giving users greater visibility into their policy environment.

Dubbed the Prevalent Policy Portal, the software solution is designed to aggregate the myriad of end-users' required policies and put them into an easy-to-manage interface.

The policy portal isn't intended to compete with security vendors' compliance solutions -- rather it integrates with some of the largest governance, risk and compliance products, Prevalent executive said. Specifically, the new solution aligns with the Control Compliance Suite from Prevalent's partnering vendor Symantec.

"(Customers) really like CCS. They wanted to use it as a platform. They wanted some additional things, like end-user interface. We built the software for them, and we won the deal," said Jonathan Dambrot, managing director of Warren, N.J.-based Prevalent Networks.

Dambrot said the Policy Portal was created to give a "hierarchical" view of customers' compliance policies, which often include PCI DSS, federal regulations such as FISMA, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and a dearth of state data breach and encryption laws as well as internal company policies.

The portal gives users the ability to search for policies and filter them by category. In addition to providing a comprehensive window, the portal also allows customers to print out their policies to a PDF or Word document.

Dambrot said that the security VAR responded to what he saw was a growing need in the marketplace for more visibility and awareness as end user customers struggled to stay on top of their policies. Once customers lose control of their policies, they are at greater risk of failing compliance audits, which could have severe consequences ranging from steep fines to losing credit card processing rights, he said.

"We're finding that policies are one of those areas that all of customers have been struggling with," Dambrot said. "Customers often don’t have access to all of their policies. The policy is done in a specific department or done in a vacuum. Or they don’t understand the context of that policy. Then that puts them out of compliance."

Creating a software solution was a next step for Prevalent as the company makes further inroads to becoming a security technology partner as well as reseller and service provider. Dambrot said that he hoped Prevalent would become more of a one-stop shop for end-users' technology needs, like "a smaller version of HP," he said.

"For us, the next step is to become a technology partner, build technology and add more significant value," he said. "We really can offer increasingly more value to those customers. They have this problem, we've got this solution."