CA to launch identity management tools

Computer Associates International's eTrust security suite will get identity management features designed to help customers stay on the right side of regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the company says.

CA plans to release a range of identity and access management tools with the existing eTrust products. This "security management architecture," as CA calls it, will enable employees to keep a single identity when logging into different applications.

"CA is committed to providing security solutions that simplify security management across all platforms--mainframe and distributed," Toby Weiss, senior vice president of eTrust security management at CA, said in a statement. "The fragmented panoply of application- and platform-specific security mechanisms across the enterprise can be coordinated, easily securing complete business transactions as they move across process boundaries."

CA has not released full details of how it will integrate these tools into eTrust products but said it would provide a "common security backbone" across all network technologies. The company says eTrust will use open standards to enable interoperability between different platforms, applications and security mechanisms.

Currently, only two CA products have the identity tracking capabilities--dubbed eTrust CA-ACF2 r8 and eTrust CA-Top Secret Security r8--but the company said the features would be integrated into all eTrust products in the future.

Regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley mean that some companies have to be able to produce audit trails for all their employees or be liable for fines and imprisonment. CA said this was a reason for its move.

Dan Ilett of ZDNet UK reported from London.