Database Security Articles
The Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) held the annual PASS Summit last week drawing 2,814 delegates and 993 pre/post-conference attendees for a total of 3,807 registrations. It is the largest turnout since the inception of the conference, and represents a 25% increase in attendance over 2009. The SQL Server community is growing "and we are very much a part of that community," Rick Heiges, vice president of marketing, PASS, told 5 Minute Briefing. The record conference attendance was not a surprise, he added. "Last year, our numbers were down about 10% but that was actually fantastic because a lot of other shows were down as much as 50%. We knew that we had a strong base to build upon. We saw signs of the economy coming back so when we started to budget for this year we had a good feeling that we would be able to have record attendance because our community is just so passionate about being here and getting together each and every year."
Posted November 16, 2010
EMC Corporation last week announced it has acquired Bedford, Massachusetts-based Bus-Tech, Inc., and today also announced it has signed a definitive agreement under which it will acquire Isilon Systems, Inc. Bus-Tech is a privately held provider of VTL (Virtual Tape Library) solutions that utilize open systems disk storage to store and retrieve mainframe tape data. Bus-Tech products enhance EMC solutions for mainframe batch processing, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, and data archiving applications. Isilon Systems is a fast-growing "Scale-out NAS" (network attached storage) systems company, based in Seattle, Washington.
Posted November 15, 2010
HP has announced the next version of its HP SOA Systinet governance platform, which adds new features such as personalized user experience, user-defined repository partitions, and multi-level application visualization capabilities. SOA Systinet 4.0 also adds support for multiple application components.
Posted November 15, 2010
Raytheon, a provider of Infrastructure security solutions, announced it has acquired Trusted Computer Solutions (TCS), a privately held company that delivers a portfolio of cross-domain, operating system and network security solutions.
Posted November 15, 2010
Application Security, Inc.(AppSec), a provider of database security, risk and compliance solutions (SRC) for the enterprise, and Unisphere Research have announced a new database security report, "Data in the Dark: Organizational Disconnect Hampers Information Security." The report, based on research conducted among 761 members of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS), reveals that companies suffer from a false sense of security.
Posted November 09, 2010
At InformaticaWorld last week, Informatica announced the general availability of the latest release of its master data management (MDM) product, Informatica 9 MDM.
Posted November 09, 2010
Oracle has announced the StorageTek Virtual Library Extension (VLE), one of the industry's first highly scalable second tiers of disk storage that optimizes tape processing in mainframe environments. Oracle says the new offering delivers two times the disk scalability to boost performance and accommodate growing workloads, along with five times the availability of current mainframe tape solutions.
Posted November 03, 2010
Quest Software, Inc. has announced new initiatives around SharePlex for Oracle, its Oracle data replication solution, in order to put real-time replication within reach of organizations with small IT departments and tight budgets.
Posted November 03, 2010
Sentrigo, Inc., a provider of database security software, has announced that Sentrigo Hedgehog Enterprise and vPatch solutions are now available on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for database audit, protection and breach prevention. Sentrigo's database compliance and security solutions allow organizations to more easily run applications subject to PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SEC regulations and more on Amazon EC2.
Posted November 03, 2010
The Pythian Group, Inc., a provider of remote database infrastructure services, has announced it has achieved four specializations under the OPN (Oracle PartnerNetwork) Specialized Program. Already a Platinum member of the OPN, Pythian has met a series of demanding technical and business requirements to earn the specializations in Oracle Database 11g, Real Application Clusters (RAC), Database Performance Tuning, and Oracle Linux. The specialized status serves as an indicator to both Oracle customers and to the Oracle team that Pythian is "a preferred go-to partner that they can engage" when facing complex problems.
Posted October 19, 2010
OpenTech Systems, Inc., a provider of tape copying, migration and disaster recovery solutions for IBM z/OS-centric data centers, announced a new release of its flagship tape copy product that includes object access method (OAM) support, along with the ability allocate data to underutilized tapes.
Posted October 18, 2010
PKWARE, Inc., a provider of data security and compression software, introduced products that extend the functionality of PKZIP and SecureZIP for Linux to mainframe environments. The new release of PKZIP and SecureZIP products for Linux on the System z operating platform supports file management and data compression on mainframes.
Posted October 18, 2010
Trusted Computer Solutions (TCS), a developer of cross-domain, operating system and network security solutions, has announced that it has partnered with Vicom Infinity, an IBM Premier Business Partner System z reseller, to offer TCS' automated operating system hardening tool to customers across all industries, especially finance and insurance, throughout North America, Canada and Australia. Security Blanket will enable Vicom Infinity mainframe users to assess Linux VMs and identify security vulnerabilities using pre-defined industry or customized security guidelines, and automatically configure the Linux VMs to a hardened state.
Posted October 13, 2010
PKWARE, Inc., a provider of data-centric security and compression software, has introduced its PKZIP and SecureZIP products for Linux on the System z operating platform.
Posted October 13, 2010
Cloud computing offers the promise of greater agility, resource optimization, and user performance, yet many businesses are understandably leery about jumping onto the cloud bandwagon until they have assurances that hosted resources will be secure. In fact, security concerns are the main obstacle to widespread cloud computing adoption among enterprises today. Before taking advantage of these capabilities, businesses need to assure users they have a simple way to access all their applications, and trust that their information is secure in the cloud.
Posted October 12, 2010
IBM is offering new software that helps businesses protect customer data and other sensitive information from security breaches. The new software, which supports both System z and SAP implementations, automatically monitors structured data and application usage across the enterprise and immediately alerts management to unusual activity.
Posted September 22, 2010
Sentrigo, Inc., a provider of database security software, has announced the availability of an integrated database activity monitoring and vulnerability assessment solution. Hedgehog Enterprise v4.0 provides a database activity monitoring and intrusion prevention platform combined with new capabilities to find, scan and validate databases containing sensitive information on a network to meet regulatory standards.
Posted September 21, 2010
Application Security, Inc., a provider of database security, risk and compliance (SRC) solutions for the enterprise, has announced the addition of Rights Management to its flagship enterprise platform, DbProtect. Determining who has rights to what data can be a laborious task and it is something that many organizations avoid because they think the task is impossible to complete, Josh Shaul, vice president of product management, AppSec, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "We realized we could solve the problem very effectively with software." The new Rights Management module allows information security analysts, business managers, and database administrators (DBAs) to automate user entitlement reviews in enterprise database environments, and also enables organizations to meet compliance regulations mandating the implementation of strong access control measures, such as those required by the Payment Card Industry - Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS.)
Posted September 21, 2010
EnterpriseDB, which provides products, services, support and training based on the PostgreSQL open source database project, has announced support for the newly released PostgreSQL 9.0 open source relational database. PostgreSQL 9.0 includes more than a dozen major improvements that enhance every aspect of database application design and performance, including built-in replication and hot standby capabilities that give PostgreSQL 9.0 the high availability required for the "scale out" and failover architectures that characterize cloud computing and other demanding application environments, as well as 64-bit Windows support. The new release also that simplifies major upgrades by removing the need for the "dump/load data" procedure required in prior versions and instead performs an in-place upgrade, which is much easier and faster.
Posted September 21, 2010
IBM today announced its intention to acquire Netezza, a publicly held company based in Marlborough, Mass., in a cash transaction at a price of $27 per share or at a net price of approximately $1.7 billion, after adjusting for cash. Business analytics is one of the fastest growing segments in the IT industry, observed Arvind Krishna, general manager of IBM's Software Group's Information Management business, during an IBM press teleconference to discuss the significance of the planned acquisition. By bringing the simplicity, ease of deployment, and speed of Netezza to IBM, the acquisition will help IBM accelerate its initiatives "to bring analytics to the masses," added Jim Baum, president and CEO of Netezza. The transaction, which is subject to Netezza shareholder approval, regulatory clearances and other customary closing conditions, is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2010.
Posted September 20, 2010
Symantec Corp. announced the availability of Symantec Enterprise Vault 9.0 and Enterprise Vault Discovery Collector, technology to help organizations store, manage and discover information across the enterprise. The vendor also announced NetBackup 5000 deduplication appliance and cloud storage for NetBackup and Backup Exec to help organizations reduce their data storage footprints and more effectively leverage cloud-based data storage services.
Posted September 20, 2010
Sentrigo, Inc., a provider of database security software, has announced the availability of an integrated database activity monitoring and vulnerability assessment solution. Hedgehog Enterprise v4.0 provides a database activity monitoring and intrusion prevention platform combined with new capabilities to find, scan and validate databases containing sensitive information on a network to meet regulatory standards.
Posted September 15, 2010
The survey was conducted in May 2010 by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., and was sponsored by Oracle Corporation. Prior to this survey, a study of the IOUG members' information security practices was first conducted by Unisphere Research in 2008, and then again in 2009. While most respondents to the 2010 survey say they are increasing their investments in security and putting in place measures to protect their information, many also feel that these safeguards are not sufficient, according to the research. Among other troubling findings from the 2010 survey, is that close to two out of five respondents' organization ship live production data out to development teams and outside parties, yet more than one-third admit that the data is unprotected or that they simply don't know if it is protected. In many cases that data consists of sensitive or confidential information.
Posted September 14, 2010
MarkLogic Corporation has announced that MarkLogic Server has earned Common Criteria Certification from an unbiased independent evaluator. MarkLogic Server has been validated in accordance with the provisions of the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) Common Criteria Evaluation and Validation Scheme (CCEVS) for IT Security, an IT security certification program.
Posted September 07, 2010
Informative Graphics Corporation, a provider of viewing, collaboration and redaction technology, announced the release of Redact-It for IBM eDiscovery Manager. IBM's eDiscovery software provides a strategic, in-house approach to more efficiently address discovery, privacy and retention requirements. Integrated with IBM eDiscovery Manager, Redact-It performs automated redaction on documents during the export phase, enabling organizations to process large volumes of documents in-house.
Posted August 31, 2010
IBM announced the zEnterprise mainframe server and a new systems design that allows workloads on mainframe, POWER7 and System x servers to share resources and be managed as a single, virtualized system. "The new mainframe is the fastest enterprise server in the world and represents a giant leap forward in performance," says Tom Rosamilia, general manager for IBM Power and z Systems. "This new dimension in enterprise computing - extending mainframe governance to POWER7 and System x blades integrated into the zEnterprise System architecture - was developed over the past three years with direct involvement from a team of IBM's 30 top customers, which provided direct input at every stage of the development process."
Posted August 11, 2010
IBM has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Storwize, a privately held company based in Marlborough, Mass. Storwize provides real-time data compression technology to help clients reduce physical storage requirements by up to 80%, improving efficiency and lowering the cost of making data available for analytics and other applications. With Storwize, IBM says, it is acquiring storage technology that is unique in the industry due to its ability to compress primary data, or data that clients are actively using, of multiple types - from files to virtualization images to databases - in real-time while maintaining performance. "This is in contrast to what we see our competitors doing, which is primarily focusing on compressing data that is inactive, or data at rest - backup data, as an example," explained Doug Balog, vice president of IBM Storage, during a conference call announcing the planned acquisition.
Posted August 10, 2010
First elected to Oracle Applications Users Group board of directors in 2009, David Ferguson became president of the OAUG this year. He talks with DBTA this month about how the users group is getting "back to basics" with educational sessions and networking opportunities as well as the new approaches it is taking to meet its members' evolving needs.
Posted August 10, 2010
Rocket U2 has announced the availability of wIntegrate v6.2.0, which offers new functionality, implementing Secure Shell (SSH) as an alternative to Telnet on UNIX- based systems. wIntegrate is a terminal emulation and host-based application enhancement tool for UniData, UniVerse (U2), and other MultiValue databases.
Posted August 10, 2010
Extending its leadership in the enterprise tape market, Oracle announced high availability and capacity enhancements to its StorageTek tape libraries and drives. New features of the StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System include an increase in scalable capacity from 70,000 to 100,000 tape slots and redundant electronics to help customers manage growth, increase availability and reduce risk. "Being able to scale to 150 petabytes with up to 100,000 tape slots under the management of a single library is a significant advantage for customers who are dealing with explosive data growth, as many companies are today," Tom Wultich, director of product management for tape at Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted August 04, 2010
IBM has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Storwize, a privately held company based in Marlborough, Mass. With Storwize, IBM says, it is acquiring storage technology that is unique in the industry due to its ability to compress primary data, or data that clients are actively using, of multiple types - from files to virtualization images to databases - in real-time while maintaining performance. "This is in contrast to what we see our competitors doing, which is primarily focusing on compressing data that is inactive, or data at rest - backup data, as an example," explained Doug Balog, vice president of IBM Storage, during a conference call announcing the planned acquisition.
Posted August 03, 2010
EnterpriseDB has announced the immediate availability of the latest version of its flagship Postgres Plus Advanced Server database. EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Advanced Server 8.4, which is built on the open source object relational Postgres database, is now fully compatible with all the features and functionality found in the most recent community distribution. In this latest release, EnterpriseDB continues to enrich Postgres Plus by building enterprise-class capabilities on top of the open source relational database management system.
Posted July 27, 2010
Aiming to help organizations simplify application security, Oracle announced Oracle Identity Management 11g, an integrated and open set of best-of-breed components built on a common platform and engineered to deliver integration within and across the suite through a series of common components. As the industry's first "service-oriented security architecture," Oracle Identity Management 11g provides enterprises with shared services for everything from identity administration, password management, authentication and authorization, workflow, encryption, and auditing to simplify application security, Rohit Gupta, vice president of product management for Oracle Identity Management, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted July 27, 2010
IBM announced the zEnterprise mainframe server and a new systems design that allows workloads on mainframe, POWER7 and System x servers to share resources and be managed as a single, virtualized system. The new mainframe is also "the most powerful and energy-efficient mainframe ever," the company says.
Posted July 26, 2010
Oracle Coherence, the latest version of Oracle's distributed in-memory data grid product, is now available. Oracle Coherence 3.6 is a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, and, along with Oracle WebLogic Server as well, is a critical component of application grid and private cloud deployments.
Posted July 21, 2010
Aiming to help organizations simplify application security, Oracle today announced Oracle Identity Management 11g, an integrated and open set of best-of-breed components built on a common platform and engineered to deliver integration within and across the suite through a series of common components. As the industry's first "service-oriented security architecture," Oracle Identity Management 11g provides enterprises with shared services for everything from identity administration, password management, authentication and authorization, workflow, encryption, and auditing to simplify application security, Rohit Gupta, vice president of product management for Oracle Identity Management, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted July 21, 2010
SAP AG and CA Technologies announced they are collaborating as part of an effort to meet the latest demands to instill governance, risk and compliance (GRC) market within business and IT processes. Leveraging products from CA Technologies with leading GRC applications from SAP will allow IT executives to gain tighter control over their IT risk and compliance initiatives and focus on long-term value creation for the business.
Posted July 20, 2010
Mid-sized businesses are using and saving more data than ever before. Indeed, the phenomenon that IT engineers have come to refer to as "big data" is being felt in businesses of all sizes. At the same time, however, organizations are facing reduced budgets. Regardless of how much data their likely overburdened IT staff must manage today and tomorrow, mid-sized businesses must find ways to save money by keeping a tight rein on both capital and operational expenditures.
Posted July 12, 2010
Everybody seems to agree with the need for organizations to do a better job of protecting personal information. Every week the media brings us reports of more data breaches, and no organization is immune. Hospitals, universities, insurers, retailers, and state and federal agencies all have been the victims of breach events, often at significant costs. State privacy laws such as the new Massachusetts privacy statutes have placed the burden of protecting sensitive information squarely on the shoulders of the organizations that collect and use it. While some managers might view this as yet one more compliance hurdle to worry about, we feel it presents an excellent opportunity to evaluate existing practices and procedures. The good news is that there are some great solutions available today that can help organizations of all stripes address these requirements while at the same time tightening data security practices, streamlining operations, and improving governance.
Posted July 12, 2010
EMC Corporation, a provider of information and storage infrastructure solutions, announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire California-based Greenplum, Inc. Greenplum is a privately-held provider of data warehousing technology, and a key enabler of "big data" clouds and self-service analytics. Upon completion of the acquisition, Greenplum will form the foundation of a new data computing product division within EMC's Information Infrastructure business.
Posted July 12, 2010
Attachmate Corporation has introduced a new enterprise fraud management solution intended to take the guesswork out of application monitoring. The solution, Luminet, is designed to reveal user activity within enterprise applications and transform resulting data into actionable intelligence, enabling organizations to protect the privacy of mission-critical data, reduce internal fraud and ensure regulatory compliance.
Posted July 12, 2010
Oracle today announced Oracle Business Intelligence 11g, an integrated and scalable suite of business intelligence products for helping customers to achieve better business visibility and alignment. The new release provides a unified environment for accessing and analyzing data that resides in relational, OLAP, and XML data sources; improved end user experience with a new integrated scorecard application and innovations in enterprise reporting, visualization, search and collaboration; and enhanced performance, scalability, and security through deeper integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g and other components of Oracle Fusion Middleware.
Posted July 07, 2010
Oracle has added upgrades to the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System product line, including built-in inline data deduplication that can be combined with inline data compression, 4 and 8 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel protocol support, multiple storage pools and new 1 and 2 TB SAS disk drives - doubling maximum system capacity to 576TB. The features are intended to help customers reduce the costs of storing, consolidating and managing data with increased storage efficiency, expand the use of the Sun Storage 7000 System product line into Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (SANs), and improve overall capacity and availability.
Posted July 07, 2010
Red Hat has unveiled Red Hat Cloud Foundations, which is intended to deliver solutions for planning, building and managing infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service private and public clouds. Cloud Foundations: Edition One, available immediately, provides "everything that a customer needs to successfully plan, deploy and manage a private cloud and it is the first in a family of Cloud Foundations that Red Hat will expand along with its partners to provide a complete set of cloud services," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager, Cloud Business Unit, at a press conference during the recent Red Hat Summit in Boston.
Posted July 07, 2010
Attachmate Corporation has introduced a new enterprise fraud management solution that is intended to take the guesswork out of application monitoring. According to Attachmate, the new solution, Luminet, reveals user activity within enterprise applications and transforms the data into actionable intelligence, enabling organizations to protect the privacy of mission-critical data, reduce internal fraud and ensure regulatory compliance.
Posted July 06, 2010
Sepaton, a provider of disk-based data protection solutions, announced it is shipping a new solution that provides for the guaranteed, auditable erasure of information on virtual tape cartridges. Sepaton's Secure Erasure, a licensed option for Sepaton's S2100-ES2 data protection systems, enables storage administrators to schedule all or selected cartridges for a total data overwrite with the clearing or purging of low, medium and high sensitivity data.
Posted June 28, 2010
Sentrigo, Inc., a provider of database security software, today announced that Sentrigo Hedgehog Enterprise and vPatch are now available for installation on GoGrid's cloud computing infrastructure for database audit, protection and breach prevention. By leveraging Sentrigo's database compliance and security solutions, organizations can implement cloud computing on GoGrid while addressing concerns regarding protection of sensitive data as well as issues related to compliance audits for key industry regulations.
Posted June 22, 2010
Idera, a provider of Microsoft SharePoint management and administration tools, announced the acquisition of iDevFactory, a provider of SharePoint security administration software. In addition, Idera announced the availability of Idera SharePoint security manager with support for SharePoint 2010. SharePoint security manager is the product formerly known as iDevFactory Universal SharePoint Manager (USPM).
Posted June 22, 2010
dataguise, a provider of security solutions for protecting sensitive data across the enterprise, has added support for IBM DB2 to its 14-day fully functional software trial version of its dgdiscover database security solution.
Posted June 15, 2010
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