Database Security Articles
If managing your corporate data for the long term isn't currently on your mind, it should be, and in several different ways: cost, performance, business continuity, and compliance. First, let's talk about cost and performance. You want to manage your database infrastructure so it can support your growing data needs within budget, while providing acceptable performance to your users. SANs (storage area networks) have enabled us to meet these contradicting goals over the last decade, and, as I mentioned in a previous column, SAN vendors are offering innovative new technologies to push on-disk storage even further. Some interesting new strategies also are helping organizations achieve a more balanced mix of cost versus performance through the use of "tiered storage."
Posted June 07, 2010
In only a few years' time, the world of data management has been altered dramatically, and this is a change that is still running its course. No longer are databases run in back rooms by administrators worrying about rows and columns. Now, actionable information is sought by decision makers at all levels of the enterprise, and the custodians of this data need to work closely with the business.That's because, in the wake of the recent financial crisis and economic downturn, there's a push from both high-level corporate management and regulators to achieve greater understanding and greater transparency across the enterprise, Jeanne Harris, executive research fellow and a senior executive at the Accenture Institute for High Performance, and co-author, along with Tom Davenport, of Competing on Analytics and Analytics at Work, tells DBTA. "In many ways, I think the ultimate result of the financial crisis is that executives realized they cannot delegate analytics to subordinates; they can't view it as technology or math that doesn't really affect them."
Posted June 07, 2010
Oracle has agreed to acquire Secerno, a provider of database firewall solutions for Oracle and non-Oracle databases. According to Oracle, Secerno's solution adds a critical defensive layer of security around databases, which blocks unauthorized activity in real time.
Posted May 25, 2010
Double-Take Software, Inc., a provider of recovery solutions, has entered into a definitive merger agreement to be acquired by Vision Solutions, Inc., a portfolio company of Thoma Bravo, LLC, in a transaction with valued at approximately $242 million. The Double-Take board of directors unanimously approved the agreement and has recommended the approval of the transaction to Double-Take's stockholders.
Posted May 25, 2010
HiT Software, a provider of provider of data integration and change data capture software products, has been acquired by BackOffice Associates, a provider of data migration, data governance and master data management solutions for Oracle, SAP and other ERP vendors.
Posted May 20, 2010
The Pillar Axiom's unified storage architecture allows users to consolidate SAN and NAS from a single storage pool within a single system, and its ability to be provisioned in a similar way as virtualized severs make it suitable for any virtualized environment. The unified storage system can be automatically and dynamically optimized for server virtualization environments. Additionally, the Pillar Axiom storage system allows administrators to provision storage uniquely tuned to the application need and priority, running on virtual servers. Storage can be provisioned in both a "thin" and "physical" context.
Posted May 20, 2010
EMC Corporation and Informatica Corporation have announced that Informatica Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) and Master Data Management (MDM) solutions have been added to EMC Select. Under this agreement, EMC will resell Informatica ILM and MDM products and services, to further extend the value of EMC's intelligent tiered storage, archive and enterprise content management platforms.
Posted May 18, 2010
Luminex, developer and provider of the Channel Gateway Modern Mainframe Virtual Tape products, announced enhanced enterprise features of their Channel Gateway products. These new features and capabilities include real-time local and remote status monitoring of tape availability and integrity at a remote disaster recovery location and "Synchronous Copy" capability in which local tape operations complete only after replicated tape data is validated to be available.
Posted May 17, 2010
SAP and Sybase, Inc. announced Wednesday afternoon that SAP's subsidiary, SAP America, Inc., has signed a definitive merger agreement to acquire Sybase for approximately $5.8 billion, in a transaction that will bring the companies together to enable customers to become better-run "unwired enterprises." The transaction is expected to close in July 2010, and Sybase will be run as a standalone company. "This is a strategic moment for SAP, for Sybase, our customers, and the IT industry," said Bill McDermott, co-CEO of SAP and a member of the SAP executive board, in a conference call for analyst and the press. "This acquisition is about accelerating growth for both businesses. This transaction is fully aligned with our strategic objectives to significantly expand our addressable market, opening up new opportunities in mobility, in-memory computing, and analytics."
Posted May 13, 2010
While enterprise users are ready to move a broad set of workloads to the cloud, they remain wary of moving their most critical business application workloads there, according to the results of a recent Unisys poll.
Posted May 10, 2010
Oracle president Charles Phillips unveiled Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g during a presentation in the Guggenheim Museum's Peter B. Lewis Theater filled with customers, analysts and the press. "Now that we can instrument the entire stack, because it is our stack, we can do things we couldn't do before," Phillips told the audience. There is value in being able to get a handle on management costs and gain more predictable environments so downtime is not a threat, and integration is not a struggle, he stressed.
Posted May 05, 2010
Pillar Data Systems has introduced new features to increase the performance, efficiency and ease of management for its Pillar Axiom storage system, building on the Axiom's Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities.
Posted May 05, 2010
In a presentation to analysts, customers, and the press at the Guggenheim Museum in New York last week, Oracle president Charles Phillips unveiled Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g which is intended to help customers maximize business agility and productivity by providing an integrated approach to IT management. "It's about finally trying to get control of this complex thing called IT — trying to manage the entire stack in a way that is different that is different than we have in the past. We are just now getting to the point in the evolution of the industry and in Oracle's strategy where that is now possible," Phillips said.
Posted April 27, 2010
Leading storage vendors have recently added support for Symantec's industry standard Thin Reclamation AP, Symantec announced. The Symantec Thin Reclamation API enables automated space reclamation for thin-provisioning storage arrays, and is now supported by Symantec partners Compellent, EMC, Fujitsu, HP and NetApp, in addition to previously announced support from 3PAR, Hitachi Data Systems and IBM.
Posted April 19, 2010
Layer 7 Technologies, a provider of Web management solutions, announced it is shipping a new line of management software to enhance the management and security of cloud environments. Layer 7's new CloudSpan family of products include three products intended to help address critical connectivity, security and delivery needs of both consumers and providers of cloud services.
Posted April 19, 2010
dataguise, a provider of security solutions for protecting sensitive data across the enterprise, yesterday announced a 14-day fully functional software trial version of its dgdiscover database security solution for Microsoft SQL Server and MS Access environments.
Posted April 13, 2010
As you work to protect your data in this day-and-age of data breaches and regulatory compliance, technology and software solutions to data and database security spring to the top of most people's minds. This is to be expected because, after all, most of our data is stored on computers so technology and software are required to protect the data from unauthorized access. This is a good thing: Technology is a crucial component of protecting your valuable business data. But it is not the only thing.
Posted April 07, 2010
It's hard enough to lock down sensitive data when you know exactly which server the database is running on, but what will you do when you deploy virtualization and these systems are constantly moving? And making sure your own database administrators (DBAs) and system administrators aren't copying or viewing confidential records is already a challenge - how are you going to know when your cloud computing vendor's staff members are not using their privileges inappropriately? These are just two of the obstacles that any enterprise must overcome in order to deploy a secure database platform in a virtual environment, or in the cloud. In some cases, these concerns have been preventing organizations from moving to virtualization or cloud computing.
Posted April 07, 2010
COLLABORATE 10 will at long last bring together Sun and Oracle users for the first time under one roof. Ian Abramson, president of the Independent Oracle Users Group, talks with DBTA about what the group is planning for the April conference in Las Vegas, and how the integration of customers and technology is being handled by Oracle and the IOUG.
Posted April 07, 2010
SOA Software, an SOA and cloud services governance provider, is delivering a toolset that includes advanced policy and security federation for SOA (service-oriented architecture) and cloud services. The new product, Policy Manager 6.0, is intended to enable the right level of control over distributed, heterogeneous systems and platforms, the vendor says.
Posted April 05, 2010
Terracotta, a provider of Java application scalability solutions, and EnterpriseDB, which provides enterprise-class products and services based on the PostgreSQL open source database, announced they are teaming up to jointly address the complex technical challenges of scaling the data layer in private clouds.
Posted April 05, 2010
HiT Software, Inc., a provider of data integration, replication and transformation products, has announced that the newest version of DBMoto, its change data capture (CDC) and data replication solution, has been expanded to include multi-server synchronization. In addition, the release also offers a dynamic, configurable GUI (graphical user interface), and provides updates for remote administration and advanced security options, as well as additional database support. DBMoto 7 will be released in the second quarter of 2010.
Posted April 05, 2010
As businesses worldwide embrace netbooks as a way to bridge the gap between low price and high performance in information technology, IBM, Canonical, and Simmtronics have announced that Simmtronics netbook, the Simmbook, is available to emerging markets at a low price of $190. With initial availability in emerging markets such as South Africa, the Simmbook is preloaded with IBM Client for Smart Work, which includes IBM Lotus Symphony, access to IBM LotusLive cloud collaboration services, and choice of adding other IBM Lotus collaboration software like Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime.
Posted March 31, 2010
Embarcadero Technologies has introduced DBArtisan XE, the newest addition to the DBArtisan family of heterogeneous database administration tools. With support for multiple database platforms "out of the box," DBArtisan XE enables database administrators (DBAs) to maximize the performance, availability and security of all major database management systems, including Oracle and MySQL, as well as SQL Server, IBM DB2, and Sybase from a single interface.
Posted March 31, 2010
Lieberman Software Corporation, a provider of privileged identity management and security management solutions, has announced enhancements to its account password management solution, Enterprise Random Password Manager (ERPM). ERPM now delivers fine-grained management features to protect every asset in the cloud infrastructure - including physical and virtual computers and network appliances, hypervisors, databases, middleware, and line-of-business applications. With this version of ERPM, cloud service providers can assure both customers and IT auditors that privileged access to sensitive data is continuously monitored and secured.
Posted March 30, 2010
Application Security, Inc., a provider of database security, risk and compliance solutions for the enterprise, has announced an update for its products, AppDetectivePro for auditors and IT advisors, and DbProtect for the enterprise, in response to the Massachusetts Data Privacy Law 201 CMR 17 effective March 1, 2010.
Posted March 25, 2010
SymSoft Corporation, a provider of governance, risk and compliance (GRC) solutions for SAP environments, has announced the release of ControlPanelGRC User and Role Change Analyzer. The new module, which is part of SymSoft's ControlPanelGRC suite of GRC solutions, provides security administrators with the ability to create additional documentation on the reasons changes were made on users and provide versioning of roles in SAP systems.
Posted March 23, 2010
Yesterday at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, Dr. Bob Sutor, vice president, Open Source and Linux, IBM Software Group, presented a keynote address that examined key issues that users should think about when considering adoption of open source solutions. The talk was titled "Asking the Hard Questions About Open Source Software."
Posted March 18, 2010
Yesterday at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, Dr. Bob Sutor, vice president, Open Source and Linux, IBM Software Group, presented a keynote address that examined key issues that users should think about when considering adoption of open source solutions.
Posted March 18, 2010
Oracle has unveiled Oracle Imaging and Process Management 11g and Oracle Forms Recognition. Both products are components of Oracle Fusion Middleware and are part of Oracle's strategic solution for Enterprise Application Documents.
Posted March 17, 2010
IBM announced a data deduplication solution for z/OS mainframe environments. The System Storage TS7680 ProtecTIER Deduplication Gateway for System z combines IBM's virtual tape library (VTL) technology with its HyperFactor inline data deduplication software.
Posted March 08, 2010
For many organizations, application information lifecycle management, or ILM, now offers expedient - and badly needed - measures for properly defining, managing, and storing data. Many enterprises are being stymied by a massive proliferation of data in their databases and applications. Growing volumes of transaction data are being digitally captured and stored, along with unstructured forms of data files such as email, video, and graphics. Adding to this tsunami are multiple copies of all this data being stored throughout organizations. At the same time, increasingly tight mandates and regulations put the onus on organizations to maintain this data and keep it available for years to come. Much of this data still resides on legacy systems, which are costly to operate and maintain.
Posted March 04, 2010
Sentrigo, Inc., a provider of database security software, has announced Repscan version 3.0, a major new release of its database vulnerability assessment and security scanning software. Version 3.0 incorporates new and improved features that allow users to more easily navigate, identify and interpret critical data within an enterprise. Among new product features is a graphical user interface, which has been redesigned to allow even security experts with limited database knowledge to run and interpret results. The whole user interface was redesigned from ground up to be more approachable by someone who was not necessarily a database expert, Andy Feit, vice president of marketing for Sentrigo, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted March 03, 2010
Zmanda, a provider of open source and cloud-based backup solutions, has announced a product that enables Tivoli administrators to incorporate backups of MySQL databases as part of an enterprise-wide backup and disaster recovery strategy. The solution, Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) Option for Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL, enables MySQL users to manage their data protection policies through Tivoli.
Posted March 03, 2010
Confio Software today announced availability of Ignite 8, a major expansion of its database performance solution. Ignite 8 expands the Ignite for SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 and Sybase products to include comprehensive performance monitoring in combination with the response-time analysis for which Ignite has been known.
Posted March 02, 2010
Sybase, Inc. recently reported financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2009. "2009 was obviously a great year of major accomplishment for Sybase," stated John Chen, chairman, CEO and president, during the Q4 earnings call. "We are very pleased that we delivered consistent financial performance throughout the year," which culminated in "the best quarter of the company history in Q4 and a third consecutive year of record revenue, earnings, as well as cash flow." For the full year, he noted, revenue came in at $1.17 billion, the highest ever, and above the company's outlook as it entered into 2009, 12 months ago.
Posted February 25, 2010
Rocket Software is planning a complimentary webcast series focused on the latest release of RocketU2 SystemBuilder Extensible Architecture (SB/XA). SB/XA is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) and deployment environment delivering up-to-the-minute interface design and portable reporting capabilities. Existing SB+ applications can automatically convert without requiring changes to the underlying code.
Posted February 24, 2010
Sentrigo, Inc., a provider of database security software, has announced Repscan version 3.0, a major new release of its database vulnerability assessment and security scanning software.
Posted February 23, 2010
Sybase has announced that its Sybase IQ column-based analytics server, in collaboration with solutions from HP and Red Hat, achieved the top data warehousing benchmark result among currently published non-clustered Linux and x86 systems in the TPC-H benchmark at the 1 TB scale factor.
Posted February 23, 2010
CA says it has extended two of its web access security products to include support for JBoss Enterprise Middleware deployments. CA SiteMinder and CA SOA Security Manager now offer secure access management for Web applications and services deployed on JBoss Enterprise Middleware, including JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, and JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.
Posted February 22, 2010
Cloud computing emerged as a key technology trend in 2009. While concerns about economic payback and data protection may be holding organizations back, Unisys predicts that in 2010 previously reluctant users will clearly see the potential the cloud represents and start making the move to take advantage of it. 5 Minute Briefing recently chatted with Brian Ott, vice president of Unisys' worldwide cloud program, about what the company sees ahead this year in terms of the enterprise embrace of cloud computing and the cloud trends Unisys expects to dominate 2010.
Posted February 10, 2010
When the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) was first enacted in 2002 in the wake of several very visible accounting scandals, small to medium enterprises may have felt they dodged a very expensive bullet. The requirement to document processes for governance, risk management and compliance (GRC), and have them confirmed by outside auditors only applied to publicly traded companies. Unlike their publicly traded brethren, SMEs were not forced to purchase costly GRC software, did not have to re-direct resources from their normal daily tasks to prepare for audits, and did not have to change their methods of operation to comply with a government mandate.
Posted February 09, 2010
Have you ever read those inserts that your bank, credit card providers, insurance company, mutual fund company, and others slip inside your statements and bills? We all get them. You know, those flimsy pieces of paper, printed in small type and written in convoluted English. I have started collecting them - sort of like baseball cards. But I doubt they'll ever be valuable. They are entertaining, though ... and disheartening.
Posted February 09, 2010
Continuity Software, a provider of disaster recovery and high availability management software, announced the general availability of RecoverGuard version 5.0, intended to deliver an end-to-end solution for validating and assuring both recovery point objectives, and recovery time objectives. Version 5.0 includes added functionality and enhancements in the areas of service level agreement management, cluster support, graphical user interface, risk detection, configuration management database systems integration, Microsoft Active Directory support and reporting capabilities.
Posted February 08, 2010
CommVault is shipping an integrated cloud storage connector for its Simpana software platform designed to enable customers to move on-premises backup and archive data into, and out of, private and public cloud storage without complex scripting or the addition of disparate cloud gateway appliances. With the addition of this new connector, the Simpana software can treat cloud storage providers as simply another target storage destination, along with on-site disk, VTL, and optical devices.
Posted February 08, 2010
KOM Networks, a provider of data storage archiving and retention solutions, has certified its KOMpliance product with CommVault Simpana 8 software to provide what KOM Networks describes as an affordable and flexible high performance data archive, search and management solution.
Posted January 25, 2010
Symantec Corp. has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Gideon Technologies, Inc., a provider of 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 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 25, 2010
Novell announced the release of an integrated file storage solution that provisions, moves, optimizes and reports on file storage based on user roles and customized business policies. The solution, Novell File Management Suite, enables organizations, regardless of operating system or existing storage management solution, to intelligently manage file storage at its source, tying the file to the user for the entire data lifecycle, the vendor says. This helps address storage costs as well as data compliance requirements.
Posted January 25, 2010
IBM reported a decrease in annual revenues between 2008 and 2009, but revenues for the most recent quarter held steady. Overall, the company reports, revenues for 2009 totaled $95.8 billion, a decrease of 8% (5%, adjusting for currency), compared with $103.6 billion in 2008.
Posted January 25, 2010
Pillar Data Systems has announced advancements to the Axiom 600 storage system with the new Slammer Series 2. The new Slammer combined with Pillar's fourth-generation AxiomONE software provides twice the cache and twice the processing power, for a 50% increase in overall performance.
Posted January 20, 2010