Database Security Articles
KOM Networks, a provider of data storage archiving and retention solutions, has certified its KOMpliance product with CommVault Simpana 8 software to provide an affordable and flexible high performance data archive, search and management solution.
Posted January 19, 2010
Symantec Corp. has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Gideon Technologies, Inc., a provider of standards-based information security solutions that automate and orchestrate IT security and risk management. Symantec is acquiring Gideon Technologies to extend Symantec's security portfolio with a leading Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) validated configuration and vulnerability assessment solution and to enhance its ability to serve the needs of public sector customers.
Posted January 19, 2010
Ingres Corporation, an open source database management company, and the Government of Jordan announced today that they have joined forces to promote and drive open source adoption. Ingres and the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology of Jordan (MOICT) have entered into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to achieve the widespread use of information technology and communication, particularly open source technology from Ingres, throughout the local software infrastructure in Jordan.
Posted January 12, 2010
CA announced that three of its leading mainframe security management software products—CA ACF2, CA Top Secret r14 and CA Compliance Manager for z/OS r1—are officially in evaluation for EAL4+ certification under the Common Criteria International security standard. Common Criteria evaluation of security products is mandated for commercial information security products purchased by the U.S. government for use in national security systems.
Posted January 11, 2010
EMC Corporation, a provider of information infrastructure solutions, announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Kansas-based Archer Technologies, a privately-held provider of governance, risk and compliance (GRC) software.
Posted January 11, 2010
Enterprises that downplay the importance of storage management may be putting other key enterprise objectives at risk. That's the message from Kyle Fitze, Director of Marketing, Storage Platforms Division, HP StorageWorks. With IT shops facing constrained budgets and data volumes continuing to escalate, Fitze says, greater efficiency in the IT infrastructure is a requirement so that more money and time can be targeted at IT projects that will drive business growth. "Today, we believe that most customers spend upward of 70% of their budget just keeping the systems running and the lights on and everything cooled, on maintenance and operations, and the remainder of their budget on innovative IT projects," he observes. What HP would like to do, "is flip that ratio, so that customers, while they spend less on IT overall, are spending a smaller percentage of their budget on operations and the larger percentage then on innovation and business intelligence, and the kind of IT projects that can help them navigate these rough waters of economic decline."
Posted January 11, 2010
Continuent, Inc., a provider of solutions for continuous data availability, advanced database replication, backup and database performance scalability, has introduced Continuent Tungsten 1.2.1 for MySQL and PostgreSQL. Continuent Tungsten offers an easy to manage, dynamic database replication solution with automatic failover, cluster management, high availability and scalability. "Early adopter customers have noticed the speed and enhanced usability provided by this new version," says Eero Teerikorpi, CEO of Continuent. "Continuent Tungsten enables our customers to reduce the cost, risk, and complexity of data availability and database performance."
Posted January 06, 2010
EMC Corporation, a provider of information infrastructure solutions, yesterday announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Kansas-based Archer Technologies, a privately-held provider of governance, risk and compliance (GRC) software. According to EMC, the combination of Archer with industry-leading technologies for information risk management and information security from EMC's RSA Security Division will significantly extend EMC's solutions portfolio for visualizing and managing risk, enabling customers to automate GRC visibility and policy enforcement across both physical and virtualized IT environments. Archer will remain in Overland Park, Kan., upon completion of the acquisition and operate as a part of RSA, The Security Division of EMC.
Posted January 05, 2010
Continuent, Inc., a provider of solutions for continuous data availability, advanced database replication, backup and database performance scalability, has introduced Continuent Tungsten 1.2.1 for MySQL and PostgreSQL. Continuent Tungsten offers an easy to manage, dynamic database replication solution with automatic failover, cluster management, high availability and scalability. "Early adopter customers have noticed the speed and enhanced usability provided by this new version," says Eero Teerikorpi, CEO of Continuent. "Continuent Tungsten enables our customers to reduce the cost, risk, and complexity of data availability and database performance."
Posted January 05, 2010
Symantec Corp. has made enhancements to Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster File System and Veritas Cluster Server, which are heterogeneous storage management and high availability solutions for Unix, Linux and Windows environments. These latest releases are intended to help organizations to employ the latest storage innovations—from SSDs to thin provisioned hardware and virtual environments including Hyper-V. The new releases also provide capabilities needed to optimize any storage or server platform. Additionally, the vendor says near instantaneous recovery of applications is now possible with Veritas Cluster File System through tight integration with Sybase, Oracle and IBM DB2-enabling faster failover of structured information and near-linear scalability.
Posted December 16, 2009
Sybase 365 , a subsidiary of Sybase, Inc., has announced a strategic partnership with the New York State Emergency Management Office (SEMO) to deploy SMS messaging services through NY-ALERT, the state's All - Hazards Alert and Notification System. The web-based portal allows state agencies, county and local governments, emergency service agencies and institutions of higher learning, to provide emergency alerting information and private notifications to a def ined audience through SMS alerts.
Posted December 16, 2009
Oracle has extended its Governance, Risk, and Compliance application suite, with the introduction of Oracle Enterprise Governance, Risk, and Compliance Manager (Oracle Enterprise GRC Manager) and the latest release of Oracle Enterprise Governance, Risk, and Compliance Controls (Oracle Enterprise GRC Controls) to deliver a closed-loop approach to regulatory compliance, risk management, and controls automation.
Posted December 16, 2009
Continuent, Inc., a provider of software solutions for continuous data availability, advanced database replication, backup, and database performance scalability, recently announced the availability of Continuent Tungsten 1.2. Tungsten 1.2 Community Edition is available free of charge, while customers who want more advanced features and on-call technical support are encouraged to purchase the commercial Tungsten Enterprise 1.2 edition.
Posted December 16, 2009
Sentrigo, Inc., a provider of database security software, has released the latest version of its flagship product, the Hedgehog Enterprise database activity monitoring and intrusion prevention solution, for leading database management systems. The new version incorporates features that allow for easier and faster deployment of highly customized security and audit policies aimed at protecting sensitive information so that organizations can meet their risk and compliance requirements.
Posted December 16, 2009
CommVault announced yesterday that it has formed a partnership with Informatica to deliver an integrated archiving solution that extends support to leading databases and applications, including Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel and other custom or legacy applications. This new technology partnership will enable CommVault Simpana software customers to easily archive large databases from mission-critical business applications, such as CRM and ERP systems, to better streamline e-discovery and improve database space management.
Posted December 15, 2009
AmberPoint unveiled a new product intended to help organizations to govern their distributed and SOA-based applications. AmberPoint Governance System is intended to foster agile governance, ensuring continual compliance across both on- and off-premise clouds and all stages of the application lifecycle.
Posted December 14, 2009
Zmanda, a provider of open source backup and recovery software, has announced Zmanda Backup Appliance (ZBA), a pre-configured virtual backup server powered by SUSE Linux Enterprise Server which the vendor says runs on VMware Server, vSphere4, ESX, and ESXi. ZBA is intended to enable IT organizations to install a backup and recovery solution for heterogeneous desktops and servers, and backs up data to local disks, tape drives or clouds. Zmanda developed the ZBA solution as part of the SUSE Appliance Program, a business and technology program that was created to help ISVs build, configure and go to market with software and virtual appliances.
Posted December 14, 2009
As we enter the next decade of the millennium, we will see information technology becoming more ubiquitous, driving an even greater share of business decisionmaking and operations. IT has proven its muster through the recent downturn as both a tactical and strategic weapon for streamlining, as well as maintaining competitive edge. Now, as we begin the next round of economic recovery, companies will be relying on IT even more to better understand and serve their markets and customers. Yet, there are many challenges with managing a growing array of IT hardware, software, and services. To address these requirements, businesses continue to look to approaches such as analytics, virtualization, and cloud computing. To capture the trends shaping the year ahead, Database Trends and Applications spoke to a range of industry leaders and experts.
Posted December 14, 2009
Listen to a group of database professionals talk for awhile and someone will eventually bring up the topic of data deduplication. Data deduplication is a means to eliminate redundant data, either through hardware or software technologies. To illustrate, imagine you've drafted a new project plan and sent it to five teammates asking for input. That single file has now been reproduced, in identical bits and bytes, on a total of six computers. If everyone's email inbox is backed up every night, that's another six copies backed up on the email backup server. Through data deduplication technology, only a single instance of your project plan would be backed up, and all other instances of the identical file would simply be tiny on-disk pointers to the original.
Posted December 14, 2009
Corporate management is complacent about data security. Efforts to address data security are still ad hoc, and not part of an overall database security strategy or plan. Companies are not keeping up with the need to monitor for potential risks. More monitoring tends to be ad hoc or on-the-fly, versus more organized or automated systematic approaches. These are the findings from new research from Unisphere Research and the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), which shows that the recent economic downturn has taken a toll on data security efforts within enterprises.
Posted December 14, 2009
Credit card security is a top priority - for both consumers and businesses. But what happens if there is a security breach exposing critical data to unknown sources? What can businesses do from an IT perspective to ensure they're protecting consumer information? When sensitive cardholder information resides in legacy host systems, host access technology can be a critical tool to help organizations successfully achieve PCI DSS compliance.
Posted December 14, 2009
Xceedium, Inc., a provider of access control and audit solutions, is shipping the latest release of its security appliance, which includes full support for mainframe and virtualized environments. The Xceedium GateKeeper Version 5 appliance is designed to proactively enforces policy to protect critical infrastructure and information assets.
Posted December 07, 2009
Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle Audit Vault Release 10.2.3.2, including key new reporting and alerting capabilities that streamline and help reduce the cost of the database audit process. To help ensure that the new Oracle Audit Vault entitlements and compliance-specific reports contain the information needed to pass real-world database audits, Oracle consulted with IT auditors, notes Vipin Samar, vice president of database security, Oracle. "This new release of Oracle Audit Vault will allow organizations to further automate their database activity monitoring and auditing processes, reducing the overall cost of meeting regulatory requirements and securing critical data."
Posted December 02, 2009
IBM yesterday announced it has acquired Guardium, a provider of real-time enterprise database monitoring and protection solutions. Guardium's technology helps clients safeguard data, monitor database activity and reduce operational costs by automating regulatory compliance tasks. Guardium is a privately held company based in Waltham, Mass. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Posted December 01, 2009
IBM today announced it has acquired Guardium, a provider of real-time enterprise database monitoring and protection solutions. Guardium's technology helps clients safeguard data, monitor database activity and reduce operational costs by automating regulatory compliance tasks. Guardium is a privately held company based in Waltham, Mass. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Posted November 30, 2009
Sentrigo, Inc., a provider of database security software, has released the latest version of its flagship product, the Hedgehog Enterprise database activity monitoring and intrusion prevention solution, for leading database management systems. The new version incorporates features that allow for easier and faster deployment of highly customized security and audit policies aimed at protecting sensitive information so that organizations can meet their risk and compliance requirements.
Posted November 24, 2009
To help organizations secure and protect their virtual server infrastructure, IBM has announced a new product to safeguard virtual server environments and allow businesses a more secure path for transitioning critical assets to virtual enterprise data centers.
Posted November 23, 2009
Sentrigo, Inc., a provider of database security software, recently announced the latest version of its flagship product, the Hedgehog Enterprise database activity monitoring and intrusion prevention solution, for leading database management systems. The new version incorporates features that allow for easier and faster deployment of highly customized security and audit policies aimed at protecting sensitive information so that organizations can meet their risk and compliance requirements.
Posted November 18, 2009
If you've read the IT press at all these days, you know that SQL Injection (SI) attacks are very common and can be devastatingly effective. In fact, SI attacks-equally easy to execute against Oracle, MySQL, IBM DB2, or Microsoft SQL Server-are among the most common hacks on the Internet today. If a web application runs a relational database on the backend, it can be subject to an SI attack, which ironically, is among the easiest web hacks to prevent.
Posted November 11, 2009
Marking Attachmate's official entry into the managed file transfer market, the company announced the FileXpress family of products, which provides a strategic solution to secure, automate and improve the movement of files over the Internet and within the data center.
Posted November 09, 2009
CA today announced CA Encryption Key Manager (CA EKM), a z/OS-based solution that unifies and automates the management, storage, distribution, and documentation of encryption keys for multi-vendor mainframe and distributed environments such as Linux, Unix, Windows and Solaris.
Posted November 09, 2009
Altova, a data integration vendor, has included Health Level Seven (HL7) and Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) standards support within MapForce Version 2009, an integrated suite of XML, database, and UML tools.
Posted October 28, 2009
EnterpriseDB, the commercial software company supporting the PostgreSQL open source database, said on Tuesday that Red Hat has made a financial investment in EnterpriseDB. With this new partnership, EnterpriseDB and Red Hat said they will continue to promote open source infrastructure solutions that emphasize the advantages of using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss and Postgres Plus to deliver lower total-cost-of-ownership.
Posted October 27, 2009
CA, Inc. has announced new products designed to help strengthen IT security, lower costs of managing compliance, and improve enterprise-wide IT risk management.
Posted October 26, 2009
Fortinet, a provider of unified threat management (UTM) software solutions, recently announced a major upgrade of its database security and compliance product, FortiDB. FortiDB is a broad solution designed to secure databases and applications for both virtualized and non-virtualized environments. The product performs vulnerability assessments (along with providing remediation advice), database activity monitoring, data loss prevention, automation of auditing and compliance, and change control to keep track of changes related to database structures and end users. FortiDB supports heterogeneous environments including Oracle, DB2, Sybase and MS SQL Server.
Posted October 20, 2009
Varonis Systems Inc., a vendor that provides software for unstructured data governance, has announced the availability of its Intelligent Data Use (IDU) Data Classification Framework for discovering sensitive information. The Framework produces rapid actionable results by uniting data classification technology with a unique meta-data layer to guide searches for files containing sensitive information.
Posted October 13, 2009
Dataguise, a provider of security solutions for protecting sensitive data across the enterprise, has announced a new version of its dataguise security suite—dgdiscover 3.0 and dgmasker 3.0. Version 3.0 is an integrated solution for comprehensive sensitive data discovery and masking, designed for file and structured database repository search across the network, discovery of sensitive data within those repositories and masking or de-identification of the data to protect against exposure and risk. With dataguise, organizations now have the ability to create corporate masking policies that allow faster adherence to compliance regulations, lower risk of a data breach, and reduced reliance on cumbersome single-database masking solutions.
Posted October 13, 2009
Ashwood Computer, Inc., a full-service VAR and preferred systems integrator for companies utilizing MultiValue database technology, has announced version 3.2 of FastBac DR, its disk-based backup tool.
Posted October 13, 2009
As my regular readers know, I am an avid reader, especially of technology books. And every now and then I review some of the more interesting database-related books in the DBA Corner column.
Posted October 13, 2009
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) can be considered the most significant compliance standard of our time. Since the passing of the legislation 7 years ago, companies have had to rethink the way they use technology to store company data. This transformation has been anything but an easy ride for companies today, and has significantly impacted the role of the CIO within an organization.
Posted October 13, 2009
High-profile data breaches at major corporations and the usual assortment of state government agencies and educational institutions have highlighted the value of encrypting data. Yet, breach numbers continue to spike and big losses are becoming more common; according to Verizon's 2009 Data Breach Investigations Report, which looks only at breaches that resulted in stolen data being used in a crime, the total number of records breached in Verizon's 2008 caseload—more than 285 million—exceeded the combined total from 2004 to 2007. Apparently the market is now so saturated with stolen data that the price of each record has dropped from a high of $16 in 2007 to less than 50 cents today. But the intensifying number of successful attacks isn't the most distressing part of data breach reports: the Identity Theft Resource Center reports that only 2.4% of the companies involved in all reported breaches utilized encryption.
Posted October 13, 2009
Compuware Corporation has announced the release of Hiperstation 7.8, which the vendor considers to be the centerpiece of its Application Auditing solution. This latest version expands Hiperstation's capabilities with the integration of Vantage, Compuware's application performance management solution, and the addition of WebSphere MQ and TCP/IP protocols. The new functionality enables organizations to more effectively protect against internal data breaches-across platforms-averting monetary losses and meeting regulations such as PCI DSS and HIPAA.
Posted October 12, 2009
Bus-Tech, Inc., a provider of modular, scalable Virtual Tape Library (VTL) controllers for IBM and compatible mainframes, announced it has partnered with Hitachi Data Systems to provide support for IBM's Transaction Processing Facility (TPF). When coupled with Bus-Tech's Mainframe Data Library (MDL), the Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family and Hitachi High-Performance Network Attached Storage (NAS) Platform, powered by BlueArc, will provide high-capacity storage systems for the virtual tape volumes.
Posted October 12, 2009
Economic pressures are resulting in tighter funding for data security, according to a webinar presented Tuesday by Ian Abramson, IOUG president; Roxana Bradescu, senior director of database security, product marketing, Oracle; and Joe McKendrick, Unisphere Research analyst.
Posted October 08, 2009
Extending the Oracle Enterprise Sign-On Suite, Oracle announced Enterprise Single Sign-On (ESSO) Anywhere, a comprehensive offering that lets enterprises host single tenant ESSO in a private cloud to provide users with secure access to heterogeneous enterprise resources from anywhere, anytime.
Posted October 08, 2009
Extending the Oracle Enterprise Sign-On Suite, Oracle announced Enterprise Single Sign-On (ESSO) Anywhere, a comprehensive offering that lets enterprises host single tenant ESSO in a private cloud to provide users with secure access to heterogeneous enterprise resources from anywhere, anytime.
Posted October 07, 2009
Idera, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and provider of management and administration solutions for Microsoft SQL Server, has introduced two new products, both of which are available as public betas through October 30.
Posted October 07, 2009
Melissa Data, a provider of data quality and data enrichment solutions, in partnership with SpeedTrack Inc., has announced the availability of SpeedTrack, a technology offering a new approach to storage, access, and analysis of data. Powered by SpeedTrack's Guided Information Access Platform (GIA), users are guided to what they are looking for simply by selecting from the unique words, characters, and values contained in the data in order to provide more accurate search results and give contextually relevant search answers. SpeedTrack applications work with any type of stored data including relational databases, text, email, PDF, Microsoft Office documents, and legacy databases.
Posted September 22, 2009
Sentrigo, Inc., a provider of database security software, has announced it is partnering with Hitachi Data Systems to integrate Hitachi IT Operations Analyzer version 1.2 into Sentrigo's Hedgehog suite of products. Hedgehog software provides full-visibility database activity monitoring and real-time protection to defend mission-critical data against insider misuse as well as outsider intrusion, and also enables compliance with regulatory requirements such as PCI DSS, Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA. The integrated solution will enable IT administrators to centrally monitor these activities from right within the IT Operations Analyzer console, and will provide users with a single view into their company's database security posture.
Posted September 22, 2009
NetIQ, a systems and security management software vendor recently released new versions of two key products that enable IT organizations to more efficiently manage and secure Microsoft Active Directory environments. These new products are NetIQ Directory and Resource Administrator 8.5 and NetIQ Group Policy Administrator 6.1. Both products are designed to help IT organizations solve the challenges they face when tasked with the native management, administration and security of Microsoft Active Directory. As they push the limits of this technology, ensuring security and internal controls becomes most critical to not only manage user access, but to eliminate human error, demonstrate compliance, and improve service delivery.
Posted September 22, 2009