New version of Archive for Servers and Relational Tools allows organizations to improve security and set business policies for archiving.Database archiving vendor Princeton Softech has announced a major new release of its Archive for Servers and Relational Tools product focusing on security enhancements.
Version 6.0 now allows organizations to better define who has access to specific data and specify business policies for archiving.
These types of enhanced security features are a step forward for database archiving, said Raymond Paquet, a vice president at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn.
"One of the keys to an archive is that the data becomes read-only, so the ability to ensure that the data is non-tamperable and uses WORM technology definitely helps," he said.
With Version 6.0, organizations can determine not only what data should be archived, but who within the organization has the authority to configure, run or view the data.
"Maybe you only want administrators to be able to configure the data, the operations staff to run the data, and end users only to be able to view the data," said Jim Lee, vice president of product management at Princeton Softech, based in Princeton, N.J.
The new version also enables roles-based permissions, allowing organizations to define people by specific jobs, such as archive administrator or user. Depending on the defined role, the person can be assigned an appropriate level of access.
Version 6.0 also provides the capability of protecting a companys business policies for archiving data as well as enforcing retention periods for data archiving.
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"Customers can now pre-configure the archiving operation and indicate who can define business policies for archiving," Lee said.
"For example, an insurance company might be archiving customers that have had no activity in the past year. Imagine how important it is to make sure those policies dont get inadvertently changed."
One of the main reasons for enhancing the products security, Lee said, was to provide greater protection, traceability and auditability needed to comply with a growing number of regulatory requirements.
"Many times a regulator will ask not only for the data but for the process that documents how you have generated that data and how you protect it," Lee said.
"So its important to show that the stored data is untampered with and explain who has access."
Archive for Servers and Relational Tools 6.0 also provides Unicode support, allowing multinational companies that want to share data across companies to do so without translation, and support for IBM TotalStorage DR550, which is based on WORM disk technology.
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The enhanced security features found in Archive for Servers and Relational Tools 6.0 distinguishes Princeton Softech from its competitors—namely OuterBay Technologies of Cupertino, Calif., and Applimation Inc. of New York, Paquet said.
"Neither have spun [their database archiving products] toward the compliance/security realm," he said.
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