Universal American Corp. Selects Courion to Support Security and Compliance Requirements by Managing User Access

Courion Corporation, the leader in identity and access management (IAM) for access risk, today announced that Universal American Corp. (UAM) has selected the Courion Suite to support its access risk management strategy through automation of key IAM processes.

UAM provides health benefits to people with Medicare and offers them affordable healthcare products and programs, including Medicare Advantage plans and traditional health insurance. UAM is responsible for managing data access for more than 3,000 users, consisting of employees, contractors and third-party system owners. Courion Suite will help the company strengthen its access risk management strategy through compliance attestation and sensitive data management, ensuring only the right people have the right access to the right information and are doing the right things. The implementation of a “contractor portal,” which Courion helped build, will facilitate the identity and access governance processes for the company’s sizable contractor base.

“Because of our highly distributed user base, which includes employees, contractors and third-party system owners, we were looking for an identity and access governance solution that could implement and manage access controls for all users across a variety of target systems and applications while supporting business operations,” said Patrick Kittell, vice president and chief security officer of information technology at Universal American. “Courion’s solution will allow us to do just this while helping us to improve compliance, mitigate risk and deliver a streamlined experience to all users simultaneously.”

UAM will use Courion’s ComplianceCourier™ solution to automate user access certification and compliance management processes associated with confidential patient and financial information. This will help UAM better comply with industry regulations such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX). For example, the company will use Courion to automate quarterly attestation processes for SOX-relevant target systems.

With an automated solution in place, UAM will be able to perform user attestation efficiently by access level for SOX applications; confirm that all assigned users are active; and eliminate the risk of “orphan” accounts, or active accounts that exist for employees and contractors who no longer require system access. This will help UAM better demonstrate to auditors that terminated employees and contractors have been de-provisioned from their primary accounts and that any stale accounts to other systems are inaccessible. UAM will also be able to better analyze user access data, gleaning intelligence from the Courion solution that will help them identify associations and patterns that might violate compliance guidelines or company policies.

In addition, Courion’s Sensitive Data Manager solution will integrate ComplianceCourier with Symantec’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) product. The integrated solution better manages access to sensitive SOX- and HIPAA-related information and helps identify potential access violations to data that is at rest in file shares. The integration with Courion ComplianceCourier will add an identity context to the DLP data, giving business managers visibility into where sensitive data resides and, which users have access, and to what specific data. It will also help UAM identify how users obtained access to the sensitive data and then certify appropriate user access. This process will help UAM immediately remediate user access that does not align with corporate, federal and industry policies.

“In today’s threat environment, identity has become an even more critical element to preventing data loss and protecting access to sensitive data,” said Stefano Paoletti, senior manager of product management, Symantec. “Integrating the discovery of sensitive data with an identity and access management solution such as Courion’s gives organizations the ability to take the actions needed to protect its most sensitive information.”

The breadth of UAM’s Access Assurance Suite deployment enables the company to manage user access risk across the entire organization. UAM also acknowledges the crucial role access controls play in improving compliance and protecting sensitive information, whether on-premise or in unstructured data repositories such as file shares.

“The Courion Suite will strengthen UAM’s access risk management strategy by providing IT staff and business managers with the access intelligence needed to easily determine potential risk levels and, in turn, help them make valuable business decisions based on the likelihood and impact of each identified threat,” said Kathy Pugh, vice president of services, Courion.

About Universal American Corp.

Universal American through our family of healthcare companies, provides health benefits to people with Medicare. We are dedicated to working collaboratively with healthcare professionals in order to improve the health and well-being of our members. For more information on Universal American, please visit our website at www.UniversalAmerican.com.

About Courion

Courion Corporation delivers software solutions that effectively and securely manage access risk. Fourteen million users across more than 500 organizations rely on Courion’s access risk management technology to align user access privileges with corporate and regulatory governance policies. Courion’s cloud and on-premise solutions provide a full range of identity and access management functionality while demonstrating compliance and achieving quick time-to-value. For more information about Westborough, Mass.-based Courion, visit www.courion.com or check out our blog at www.courion.com/blog.

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