News

Start-up offers appliance for SarbOx compliance

• By Rich Seeley
• October 6, 2004

Seeing an opportunity to help companies deal with Sarbanes-Oxley, nLayers is offering an IT network appliance that helps with compliance. The San Jose, Calif.-based start-up's first product, nLayers InSight, is a passive -- as in non-invasive -- plug-in appliance that provides IT departments with an optimization tool that looks at the infrastructure and finds ways to streamline business processes.

Version 2.0 now offers added features for meeting the requirements of SarbOx.

Gili Raanan, nLayers founder and CEO, tells Programmers Report that Interwoven is using nLayers InSight for SarbOx. The firm's IT department produced required reports with a component called nLayers Snapshot, which gives CIOs an overview of servers, applications and business processes.

As Raanan explains, it can also provide some of the documentation SarbOx requires.

'Part of the Sarbanes-Oxley requirement is that you identify all your financial systems, data sources, databases and file servers, and be able to create controls that show who has access to these systems,' he says. 'So they [Interwoven] are using nLayers InSight to automate that process, save time and money, and create a repeatable control they can use next year or every three months because Sarbanes-Oxley is a requirement that is not going to go away.'

nLayers is a labor-saving device when it comes to meeting SarbOx requirements, adds Alex Sagers, Interwoven's director of corporate IT.

'We used nLayers Snapshot service to quickly document our network layer as it pertained to Sarbanes-Oxley,' he writes in an e-mail response to a Programmers Report question. 'What would have taken my staff many days to document [and would have been subjective], took nLayers less than a day and was extremely accurate. We were extremely impressed with the level of detail in the report and look forward to our next Snapshot this coming quarter.'

To nLayers' Raanan, using automated tools like InSight -- with a starting price of $2,438 per month on a subscription basis -- is a drop in the bucket compared with some estimates that overall SarbOx compliance is costing company's as much as $7 million this year alone.

'It's an ongoing, repeating requirement, and organizations need to find ways to automate the process,' he says. 'Most of them invested a lot of money this year just to do a manual process with the help of KPMG and other auditing firms. But now they need to find ways to automate it.'

He's hoping they find their way to nLayers' door ... or at least the firm's Web site.

Links: nLayers' Web site: http://www.nlayers.com

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