Businesses are looking for security products that do more than just put out fires on the network. They want technology that helps to protect the bottom line, especially when it comes to complying with the growing number of government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA. Failing to comply with those regulations, or not being able to prove that you're complying, can damage a company's revenue and reputation, and could even result in criminal charges.

RSA Security Inc. on Monday will introduce software to help companies monitor and report on their compliance efforts. The RSA Reporting & Compliance Manager is designed to provide better logging and reporting capabilities for both IT administrators and auditors. The software provides views into user access rights and the activities of employees, partners, and customers working on networks protected by RSA security products. It can produce reports to show who has access to what data and who actually looked at what information, what changes have been made to access policies and who made them, and the number and types of unsuccessful unauthorized attempts at access.

The Reporting & Compliance Manager product works with RSA's ClearTrust event logging tool. The combination lets customers generate reports on past and present access policies, including user behavior, authentication attempts, and resources accessed. They're designed to let companies provide evidence of regulatory compliance and give them the ability to investigate security events.

Setting, managing, changing, and auditing access control can impose a big burden on IT staffers, says Julie Rahal Marobella, an industry analyst at IDC. Automating some of these tasks can save time and effort. "Companies currently take a more manual approach to compliance, she says, "and it's very time consuming."