Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit, Los Angeles (Booth E) - November 14, 2007 - Symark Software, the leading provider of information security solutions for managing privileged account access, today released the results of a survey of more than 230 security professionals at large and medium-sized enterprises. The survey sought to measure the major business drivers for organizations in choosing identity and access management (IAM) products. According to the results, 44.5 percent of respondents said improving data security is their primary objective when deploying privileged account access IAM solutions while nearly 32 percent of respondents cited regulatory compliance.

Too often organizations focus on the regular guy in the organization and overlook the IT systems administrators who access privileged high-level accounts that contain proprietary data on a daily basis, said Ellen Libenson, vice president of product marketing at Symark Software. This survey shows that nearly half of all companies who responded are taking the right approachfocusing on establishing a strong foundation of data security on which to build current and future compliance efforts. These organizations understand that the common denominator in most regulatory compliance efforts is strong access security which means controlling and monitoring internal activity in privileged accounts to improve data security.

When asked which industry regulations impacted their organization, more than 56 percent of respondents cited Sarbanes-Oxley and 31.9 percent cited the Data Privacy Protection Act. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) was the third most popular response at 18.2 percent, outpacing longer-standing regulations such as HIPAA (15 percent) and Basel II (14.1 percent).