Symantec
officials spent a fair amount of time discussing integration
possibilities between their security and storage products during their
Vision conference in Las Vegas.
Now, two weeks later, the company has taken a step toward that goal
by expanding the data discovery technology of its Vontu Data Loss
Prevention product.
At Vision,
Symantec executives said they would be looking for ways to integrate
the content awareness capabilities of their DLP (data loss prevention)
technology into their storage portfolio. It is a gambit by the company
based on the belief that data discovery will be a key driver in the
market for CMF (content monitoring and filtering) and data loss
prevention tools. According to the company, some two-thirds of its new
customers purchase data-at-rest as part of their initial DLP investment.
With that in mind, Symantec has added new management features and
native support for SQL databases to help in the area of content
discovery. The idea is to help simplify the process of conducting
enterprise-scale audits for databases such as Oracle, IBM DB2 and
Microsoft SQL Server.
"Previously, SQL database scans had to be triggered remotely," said
Helen Yu, senior product marketing manager. "Now, from a single
console, an administrator can define a data protection policy and
initiate native scanning of relational databases. In addition, Vontu
Data Loss Prevention now has enhanced operating system coverage for
Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista, and can perform parallel
scanning of thousands of systems by leveraging the Vontu Endpoint DLP
agent architecture."
It is easy enough for organizations to lose track of the number of
databases they have, as well as what is inside them. As a result, some
enterprises are concerned about legacy storage of unencrypted
confidential data or the storage of production data in test systems,
while others worry about things like inadvertently storing sensitive
data in the 'comments' field of a CRM (customer relationship
management) application, Yu said. Then there are auditors pressuring
businesses to provide a complete account of what databases contain
sensitive information, she added.
"With native SQL database scanning, companies can set up an
automated job [that] systematically connects to every database,
discovers the database schema and produces a report of where all the
sensitive data resides," Yu said. "Without this capability, they would
likely be required to rely on conversations and recollections of staff
[that] often are in the dark as to the actual data stored in the
databases."
