Review: MetricStream Risk Management Solution

MetricStream Risk Management Solution v6.0 enables organizations to identify, assess, quantify, monitor and manage their enterprise's operational and IT risks. MetricStream brings together all risk data and processes, including risk and control assessments, key risk indicators, loss management, continuous risk assessments for vulnerabilities and threats, external data feeds, risk mitigation and monitoring, risk visualization and analytics, scenario modeling, risk heat maps and compliance dashboards.

The compliance support is very complete with prepopulated content while mapping the framework back to COBIT and ISO standards. MetricStream combines software and content to deliver operational and enterprise risk management solutions with embedded best practices and risk-control libraries. The solution provides timely, actionable information for integrating risk management into corporate decision-making.

The interface was easy to use and is highly configurable. It ships with default policies that can be modified. Assets can't be "discovered." They are created in the product but can be imported from an asset inventory system. As assets are classified, relevant controls are automatically applied. The solution captures threat, event and vulnerability data directly from a wide variety of security products.

The software can be deployed on any Windows, Solaris or Linux system and it uses an Oracle backend. The application is a web server and access is via a standard web browser, and it is designed to provide a high level of scalability. We were told that the software will take some time to load and configure, but once completed, with all the default content and intuitive user interface, getting up and running won't take much time at all.

Great tool for managing risk as part of an automated GRC program.