Emerging Vendors

June 26, 2009

Company: Aveksa

Headquarters: Waltham, Mass.

Technology Sector: Security

Key Product: Aveksa Compliance Manager

Year Founded: 2004

Number of Channel Partners: 13

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: Aveksa closes the security gaps left when employees change jobs, leave a company or are terminated.

The Lowdown: Aveksa tackles a complex problem that many companies would prefer to avoid -- designating and managing employees' access privileges based on their role.

It sounds easy. But in light of how many times employees are hired, fired, leave a company or change positions, that can be a pretty complex challenge, said Brian Cleary, vice president of products and marketing for Waltham, Mass.-based Aveksa.

Aveksa Dashboard

As a result, Aveksa, which primarily serves enterprise customers, aims to rid companies of orphaned accounts and provides appropriate access controls for the appropriate people. Its flagship products, Aveksa Compliance Manager, Aveksa Role Manager and Aveksa Access Request and Change Manager, are designed to address a range of access governance issues, allowing IT administrators to request or change access rights once an employee's job has terminated or shifts within the organization. Cleary said that the majority of customers -- about 70 percent -- purchase all three modules.

"Once we have those business roles, we transfer them into sets of actions that need to take place within the infrastructure," Cleary said. 'What you want to do is ensure the business can be successful. You can apply the appropriate policies or controls, no matter what action is taking place."

About half of Aveksa's business is geared toward enterprise companies that need to ramp up regulatory compliance for audits, including PCI, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley requirements.

However Cleary maintained that other verticals, such as finanance and health care organizations, adopt entitlement management solutions simply because they want or need to reduce the amount of risk surrounding critical data.

"Security for them is a check in the box," Cleary said. "The data they're working with is so sensitive, in essence their business would tank if it was breached. It's really assurance for them."