Ideagen Risk Management vs. McAfee Foundstone (discontinued)

Pentana is great for monitoring PIs and risks. We find it less helpful for monitoring projects (with the Actions module); it isn't quite flexible enough for our needs, though the support team have been very helpful in adding custom fields for us.

It is well suited for big organizations like banks and multi nationals who can afford the cost and data security is high priority and highly desired. Whereas it is not well suited for small organizations with little budget. There should be product models where it can provide cost effective solutions for small organisations as well.

Incentivized

• Pentana is excellent for monitoring, recording and reporting on PIs. Very easy to use the PI module.
• Pentana is excellent for monitoring risks at various levels (service, strategic etc.). Risks are displayed very clearly in a tree structure and the module is relatively easy to use.

• It identify and report security breaches
• It secures VPN access
• Wireless network security is optimized
• Voip security risks are addressed

Incentivized

• Pentana could improve the free Documents module that comes with Pentana Risk. At the moment documents have to be linked to an action in order to display query results (such as how many documents are due for review) - this can be confusing for users who don't understand why there is an action linked. There is also no easy way for users to see the documents that are assigned to them.
• We would like to use the Actions module fully in order to monitor our corporate projects, but it a bit confusing for users and not very flexible when a project doesn't mirror Pentana's way of monitoring actions.

• Although it has lot of artificial intelligence to identify risks and threats, it should stop any attack or information gathering from intruders
• It utilizes lot of system resources, it should be improved
• It makes system slow, it should be addressed

Incentivized

Some modules are more user-friendly than others. It's sometimes not obvious where to click to update the fields (or even that field titles can be clicked on). We have written 'Howdys' to help users. There can also seem to be a lot of steps/clicks to updating risks and actions. The Reports module on Pentana classic is certainly not user-friendly, particularly the Report Layout and Charts modules - we were told these would be integrated into the web version but this hasn't happened yet.

The support team are excellent and always answer queries promptly. They are very helpful.

We selected Pentana because our neighbouring authorities are users and had spoken highly of the product and given us demonstrations; some of our staff were also familiar with Pentana when it was called Covalent. It seemed to be the best product on the market for monitoring risks, PIs and projects.

I have found Mcafee as one of the best security software as compare to the others. The other security products I have used so far are Norton utilities, Symantec. Kaspersky, avg, avast. one of the reason for mcafee being better is that it does not bother the user every time for system check or fake warnings.

Incentivized

• Pentana Risk has allowed my team to focus on other areas of work whereas before we would be manually chasing for updates on PIs and risk. Pentana Risk does the chasing for us!
• We are able to produce reports for audit purposes very easily, rather than sending spreadsheets which is what we used to do.
• New managers can easily inherit risks, projects and PIs and see all of this on a custom portal, saving them time when they start.

• The resource security ensures business system continuity against any contingency
• Work interruptions due to malware and other threats are minimzed
• It ensures long term use of the IT systems. Eg if Windows is corrupted every day then you will incur extra cost for reinstall. It saves cost.

Incentivized