Guardium – Real-Time Database Protection and Compliance

Guardium Secures and Monitors Access to Enterprise Data for Microsoft SQL Server 2008

Support for SQL Server Advanced Security Features Provides Comprehensive Visibility into Critical Database Activities

WALTHAM, Mass. (February 27, 2008) ─ Guardium, the database security company, today announced support for Microsoft SQL Server 2008, providing customers with a single scalable platform for addressing security and compliance requirements across their entire application and database infrastructures. This expanded support for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 gives enterprises increased visibility into database activities – even when database connections are encrypted – without impacting database performance.

Guardium provides the most widely-deployed enterprise security platform for preventing information leaks from the data center and ensuring the integrity of corporate information. The company’s real-time monitoring technology uses both policy-based controls and anomaly detection to prevent unauthorized activities by potential hackers, privileged insiders, and end-users of enterprise applications such as Oracle Financials, PeopleSoft, and SAP.

SQL Server 2008 provides a security-enhanced and proven platform with advanced security technology for business critical applications. Guardium’s appliance-based technology continuously inspects all SQL Server 2008 traffic including encrypted SSL connections, without the security risk and added complexity of uploading keys to the appliance. For complete visibility, Guardium also captures all privileged user access to databases via “back-door” connections such as local TCP, named pipes and shared memory.

“Data security is at the forefront of customers’ minds, requiring complete visibility across all database servers,” said Upesh Patel, vice president of business development at Guardium. “Our relationship with Microsoft enables us to fully support SQL Server 2008 as soon as it’s released, giving customers a single centralized platform for managing security and audit policies across all of their DBMS platforms, enterprise applications, data center locations and compliance initiatives.”

Guardium was recently recognized by Forrester Research as “A Leader across the board” in enterprise database auditing and real-time protection, with “dominance and momentum on its side,” after earning the highest overall scores for Current Offering, Product Strategy, and Corporate Strategy (“The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Database Auditing and Real-Time Protection, Q4 2007”, Forrester Research, Inc., October 2007).

Proactive Security and Simplified Compliance
Unlike traditional logging solutions, Guardium provides real-time alerting and other preventive controls for proactively addressing security incidents such as unauthorized access or changes to sensitive data. By monitoring all SQL Server traffic at both the network level and on database servers themselves, the Guardium solution provides full visibility into all database transactions without relying on transaction logs (which don’t capture read operations) or trace logs (which can impact performance and stability).

In addition, Guardium’s centralized architecture allows organizations to aggregate and normalize all of their database audit information into a secure centralized repository, supporting separation of duties required by auditors as well as enterprise-wide compliance reporting, automated sign-offs, and forensics. This scalable approach streamlines compliance for key regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and data privacy laws.

“Security and compliance are essential capabilities for the success of SQL Server 2008,” said Kim Saunders, senior director of SQL Server marketing at Microsoft Corp. “Guardium’s support for the new security enhancements helps enable customers to manage their monitoring needs with the assurance that all communications with SQL Server 2008 are highly secure.”

About Guardium
Guardium, the database security company, develops the most widely-used solution for database activity monitoring, security and auditing. Founded in 2002, Guardium was the first company to address the core data security gap by delivering a scalable enterprise platform that both protects databases in real-time and automates the entire compliance auditing process.

The company has partnerships with Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Sybase, BMC, EMC, RSA, Accenture, NetApp, McAfee, and NEON, with Cisco as a strategic investor, and is a member of IBM’s prestigious Data Governance Council and the PCI Security Standards Council.

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners.

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Media Contacts:
Corinne Federici and
Adam Parken
Corporate Ink
617.969.9192