BeyondTrust Unveils Free Google Apps Auditing Tool

Google (GOOG) Apps partners and customers now have a new auditing tool available free of charge. BeyondTrust, which has focused on providing context-aware security intelligence products, has released PowerBroker Auditor for Google Apps to its user community.

Developed to "ease the burdens associated with auditing these commonly used web applications for proper usage and compliance," PowerBroker Auditor aims to automate the previously manual tasks of gathering auditing events and creating reports for operations management, security and compliance officers, and internal and external auditors.

"While Google Apps is a great productivity suite for organizations, it's become a bit of a compliance headache for IT admins who are already resource-constrained by the need to prove ongoing compliance to critical government regulations," said Brad Hibbert, executive vice president of Product Strategy and Operations at BeyondTrust, in a prepared statement. "Our goal at BeyondTrust is to give customers the visibility and controls necessary to reduce their IT security risks, while at the same time simplifying their compliance reporting. PowerBroker Auditor for Google Apps is doing just that."

PowerBroker Auditor for Google Apps gives BeyondTrust's user community the ability to track and report on a wide range of changes in Google Apps, including users, groups, roles, email, calendar, chat and mobile. A little bit of everything, really. Events can be retrieved live for immediate review or collected on a predetermined schedule to be saved in a database for historical reporting.

Additionally, the tool can filter key user and event types into reports for export to Microsoft (MSFT) Excel and Word, as well as PDF format.

Getting a copy of the tool requires little more than filling out a form on the BeyondTrust website, and it looks to be something Google Apps partners could use to add value to their own sales and services efforts. Being able to do the legwork (which appears to be very little considering the automated nature of the BeyondTrust tool) and provide customers with audit reports on their Google Apps usage and data could be a nice value-add, particularly for the SMB market.