Symantec announced a new release of Symantec Database Security Tuesday, a key component of the company’s Security 2.0 vision that it launched almost a year ago.
Symantec Database Security 3.0 provides several new capabilities to help companies prevent the loss of sensitive information or intellectual property stored in databases and comply with the increasing number of data protection regulations globally.
“Losing database information is a serious problem that costs companies hundreds of millions of dollars every year – and it’s getting more complicated as the world becomes more interconnected,” said Don Kleinschnitz, vice president of development, Symantec.
Data loss is a concern for any company that stores sensitive information, particularly those that must adhere to common information protection regulations set by industry or government groups. Protecting information in databases from both internal and external threats is a key challenge. In 2006, 116 database breaches were reported, involving an estimated 65 million records, according to Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a non-profit consumer information and advocacy organization. Analysts estimate that the total cost of database breaches in 2006 was approximately billion.
Symantec Database Security 3.0 offers capabilities to help enterprises lower their information risk and liability by minimizing or preventing data loss and meeting regulatory compliance requirements. It monitors and audits all network SQL activity between end users and databases, as well as helps implement policies, measure and report on database environments to ensure the safe distribution of sensitive and confidential information.
The new solution incorporates a new Intruder Identification component, built-in heuristic learning capabilities, real-time, transaction policy alerts and integration with Symantec Security Information Manager.
“Symantec Database Security 3.0 helps companies reduce the risk of losing sensitive data by giving their IT professionals greater control over database traffic and confidence in their compliance posture,” said Kleinschnitz.
Symantec Database Security 3.0 adds several new enhancements and features, including:
• Heuristic Learning – New heuristic learning capabilities help reduce cost and complexity by automatically recommending SQL behavior patterns that align with internal IT policies. Recommendations are generated and based on IT enterprise activities such as mergers and acquisitions, new and legacy application implementation and software phase out.
• Intruder Identification – This new component allows users to trace malicious or suspicious activity back to the source of the activity, remediate the situation and prevent it from happening again. It does this by matching the user’s credentials or IP address with the information captured on the original backend database transaction.
• Real-time Policy Alerts – New transaction policy functionality enables database administrators to monitor and correlate inbound and outbound database traffic with real-time alerts. This helps fine tune and aggregate policies to monitor transactions rather than relying on individual queries or responses, saving significant time and resources.
• Integration with Symantec Security Information Manager (SSIM) – New integration allows customers running SSIM and Symantec Database Security 3.0 to view critical database security alerts by consolidating events from multiple Symantec Database Security soft-appliances and presenting them to the SSIM console.
Available worldwide through Symantec’s network of value-added resellers, distributors and system integrators, Symantec Database Security 3.0 supports multiple databases, including Oracle, IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL and integrates with hardware device management tools such as Dell OpenManage, Hewlett Packard OpenView and Symantec Security Information Manager. |
