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CA Launches Governance, Risk And Compliance Solution For Power And Utilities IndustryCA And Sirius Solutions Help Companies Address Multiple Reliability Standards With A Sustainable NERC Compliance Program

(Sept 11, 2008)-- CA, Inc. recently announced CA GRC Manager NERC Program Accelerator, a complete North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) compliance program for power and utility customers. In support of this new solution, CA is partnering with Sirius Solutions, a leading consultancy with extensive experience implementing sustainable compliance programs, including NERC, for the largest U.S. power & utility companies. CA GRC Manager is a comprehensive solution for Risk Management, Compliance, Audit and IT professionals designed to centrally manage risk and compliance initiatives across the entire enterprise.

NERC serves as the central authority in approving and enforcing Electric Reliability Organization (ERO) and Regional Reliability Organization (RRO) standards. These comprehensive standards define the reliability requirements for planning and operating the North American bulk power system and include both operational and technology concerns.

Today, many of the NERC CIP (Critical Infrastructure Protection) standards for reliability of the power grid are already in place. All bulk power system owners, operators, and users across North America must meet these standards in a timely fashion or face substantial financial penalties. Compounding the challenge are standards set by Regional Reliability Organizations. With additional NERC standards now pending, compliance has become a moving target that can be reached only by implementing a compliance program with the right blend of centralized and distributed project capabilities, monitoring and reporting, failure notification mechanisms and remediation procedures.

CA GRC Manager offers power and utility companies improved management of multiple regulations impacting business operations, including SOX, HIPAA, PCI, EPA and DHS regulations, plus expanding industry oversight from NERC and FERC. The new solution is designed to enable enterprises to centralize their compliance programs, reduce costs and transform their risk and compliance efforts into a continuous, sustainable process. CA GRC Manager offers a replacement for the unsustainable mix of multiple systems and ad-hoc spreadsheets, charts and documents that are typically used handle compliance information.

"We're excited to be partnering with Sirius Solutions to provide this unique offering to centralize and simplify compliance for customers in the power and utilities industry," said Marc Camm, senior vice president and general manager of GRC Products at CA. "GRC Manager's unique program management capabilities provide an ideal solution for highly regulated industries that require sustainable compliance programs."

"NERC reliability standards are mandatory and enforceable, carrying significant financial penalties of up to $1M per day per violation. Many companies have no sustainable compliance process for all NERC activities across their assets, and expenses associated with maintaining multiple control environments continue to grow," said Michael A. Sanchez, director, NERC Service Area, Sirius Solutions, LLLP, "CA GRC Manager is designed to enable organizations to manage the complexity associated with evolving regulatory requirements. Whether a company is complying with NERC, FERC, or any of the expanding array of regulations, they can automate and better reduce the costs of compliance tasks by combining CA's comprehensive technology, with the experience and expertise offered by Sirius Solutions."

With the CA GRC Manager NERC Program Accelerator, power and utility customers can:

Jumpstart development of a sustainable NERC compliance program by leveraging a set of rationalized NERC control objectives, as well as best practice methodologies, custom dashboards, reports and testing project templates.
Better manage NERC audit and compliance programs via a customizable set of roles, asset types, and workflows.
Improve visibility into the status of a NERC audit project via customized dashboards and reports.
Simplify the creation of NERC audit tasks by mapping NERC function types and regions against the audit request, and notifying affected owners of pending audit tasks.
Help ensure that critical NERC deadlines dates are met using pre-built notification and escalation processes. 

For more information on CA GRC Manager, please visit www.ca.com/grc

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