Asian banks fortify risk management

Global research firm IDC claims the current economic crisis has motivated banks in Asia-Pacific to strengthen their vendor risk management practices, reports InfoWorld.

Expanding regulation, a consolidating vendor landscape, and more stringent vendor selection guidelines are also driving banks to focus on vendor management, according to the research firm.

Michael Araneta, senior consulting and research manager at IDC, says: "Banks have recognised that technology failures, including the failure of technology vendors to deliver, can have dire implications for business continuity and their institution's reputation. As such, they have raised the yardstick when assessing vendor risk."

Governance, risk and compliance (GRC) solutions provider, Agiliance, has entered into a joint business relationship with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), states PR-USA.

The companies will be jointly marketing solutions that automate manual processes for meeting government and industry regulations.

Jerry Lewis, a Dallas-based principal in PwC's Advisory practice, says: “We are looking forward to leveraging Agiliance's RiskVision platform with PwC's experience in GRC, internal controls, and information security consulting services to continue to lead the way in GRC automation.”

Novell has revealed its cloud-computing identity and access management service, due for release in early 2010, says ZDNet.

The service has been in a private joint-development phase with hosting partners and is based on existing components used in Novell's Access Manager, Sentinel and Identity Manager products.

Markus Krauss, Novell VP of identity and access management for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, says: "If you have governance, risk management and compliance activity in your organisation, the cloud becomes absolutely seamless for you from a policy point of view because, through the connectors, we integrate the cloud as part of your standard infrastructure. It becomes fully transparent.”