Lumigent Technologies recently introduced its AppGRC suite, a governance risk compliance (GRC) controls suite for business applications.

The AppGRC applications are designed to strengthen the integrity of critical business operations and reporting by monitoring compliance for primary business applications. Through automated, data baselining and continuous monitoring using application based corporate controls and policies at the database layer, AppGRC provides persuasive, source-level information -- the who, what, when and before/after values -- to enhance the integrity of financial reporting and decision making.

On average, a company spends $2.5 million on compliance and business controls. That is a growing trend, driven by expanding governance requirements. Today, companies spend that money on manual labor. Considering today’s economic difficulty and emerging regulatory certainty, AppGRC automates that process, driving down the costs of meeting GRC requirements while improving governance-driven productivity and profitability.

Lumigent builds upon 1) controls automation and monitoring and 2) database activity monitoring to establish a new GRC market segment: Application GRC. Lumigent AppGRC complements offerings from a variety of vendors, including Paisley, MetricStream, Approva, Axentis, Oracle, and SAP in a variety of GRC segments, including Enterprise GRC and security.

Lumigent analyzes business process applications, using subject matter experts to identify data source fields that must be monitored. We define the rules and policies that should control the source data. Those data definitions, rules, and policies go into our “Factory,” where we create the complementary AppGRC application, which combines best practices with deep industry and regulatory expertise. AppGRC then continuously monitors the source data, providing before and after images of data changes that exceed policy parameters.

Because they’re finished and pre-configured, AppGRC applications can be up and running in days rather than months. Yet, AppGRC can be extended and configured to meet an organization’s unique controls and regulatory demands.

Key features across the entire AppGRC suite include baselining, reporting templates, command line interface, and complete audit trails.

While system requirements vary by installation, the representative minimum server configuration is 2 CPUs (or a single, dual-core CPU), 8 to 16 GB of memory, and 100 to 200 GB of disk space. Supported server operating systems include Windows, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux Red Hat, and Linux SuSe. Database support includes IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and Sybase.

Prices range from $42,000 to $360,000 depending on the complexity of monitored applications and size of the customer.