Security vendor Symantec is in the process of building a "risk-management dashboard".
"The risk-management dashboard was customer driven," said Enrique Salem, Symantec's group president of worldwide sales and marketing. "It's a question not only of what you surface, what the meaningful pieces of information are, but also the report has to be easy to present and digest," Salem told ZDNet.co.uk.
Salem said that Symantec hoped that the risk-assessment dashboard information would be used to benchmark company performance, and that benchmarking information would be shared.
Jon Collins, an analyst with Freeform Dynamics, said that many executive dashboards had failed due to the complexity of what went on behind the dashboard. However, Collins said that, as this dashboard appeared to be more focused on one particular area of business, he wasn't expecting the same problems. "It's really healthy that organisations are looking at risk in a holistic way," said Collins.
Separately, Symantec has launched a risk-management consultancy and assessment service. Symantec consultants will look at security, availability, performance and compliance within a company, before producing a report. The "Foundation IT Risk Assessment" service will cost £30,000 for two consultants for three weeks.
"It's about understanding the risks in the security space, looking across your IT environment," said Greg Hughes, group president of Symantec global services.
Symantec said it would not use the consultations as an opportunity to sell more Symantec products. "Our software account managers go nowhere near these projects. Are people cynical about that? Absolutely," said Darren Thomson, Symantec's senior director of IT risk management.
Symantec has been running a pilot service for the last six months, and has between 70 and 90 customers.
