Crossroads, Symantec Lock the Database Box - ' Nurturing Ideas ' (
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The product, for which Egan said there is no due date as of yet, is the first to come from the 15-month-old Advanced Concepts group within Symantecs research arm.
The idea behind the genesis of the Advanced Concepts group was to take promising ideas out of research and to fast-track them, nurturing ideas through field testing or marketing with existing Symantec customers.
Symantec actually began working on the database appliance three years ago but found it was ahead of its time, Egan said.
But last years uptick in reported breaches, on Web servers, databases and applications, meant the timing was finally right, he said.
"Information was escaping out into the wrong hands," he said. "So the timing was thought to be" ripe, he said.
Symantec started the development process on the product in early 2005, signing up pilot customers.
The company delivered a prototype to them in September, and its been running in operational environments the past four or five months.
So far, the feedback has been strong, making it the first concept out of the new group to be ready to push to product, Egan said.
"Were at the end of the cycle on the advanced concept side, and were looking at how wed transition to a commercial product from the company" at this point, he said.
The Database and Audit Security Solution—which is a name for the technology concept, not the product, Egan said—will sit out on the network in front of databases.
From there, it will keep a watchful eye on transactions going into the database as well as whatevers leaving it.
The box will be able to keep an electronic trail of whats being done to the database, which is vital for compliance reasons.
"All the auditors, they all want to see electronic paper trails," Egan said.
The box will also keep an eye on patterns of usage to detect deviations from normal. It will build profiles of what represents baseline behavior, and will thus track deviation and send off alerts to flag the behavior.
Finally, the box will feature what Egan called extrusion control. In other words, it will detect unusual amounts of sensitive data leaving the database. "Thats a key [feature]," Egan said. "Businesses sure as hell want to detect user pulling down a whole table."
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