Security vendor Symantec is looking beyond its agent-based compliance management capabilities with the $209 million purchase of BindView Development Corp.

The deal, still subject to regulatory and BindView shareholder approvals, gives the Cupertino, Calif., security company the ability to offer a more comprehensive security and policy compliance offering for customers, according to officials.

''Not only will we be able to meet customers' IT security and policy compliance needs with a complete range of product capabilities, but we will also be able to help reduce the cost and complexity associated with compliance,'' Ajei Gopal, a Symantec senior vice president, said in a statement Monday.

An agent is software code that monitors, manages and reports on an individual system's status -- whether it has the latest patches, has the correct user permissions and the like -- but requires more administration from an IT staff.

Agent-less security management solutions, on the other hand, don't require software to be installed on each machine and are considered ideal for automating security and policy compliance management in decentralized IT environments such as desktop machines on the network, according to Symantec officials. II).

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