Vendors Tie Database Monitoring, Security Event Management

More and more vendors are tying together database activity monitoring and security information management, a move that could benefit enterprise data protection efforts.

Imperva and ArcSight announced interoperability between their products in December 2008. In March 2008, Guardium announced integration with a number of SIM (security information management) vendors, including ArcSight, CA and LogLogic.

Now NitroSecurity has joined the party. Six months after purchasing RippleTech for its DAM (database activity monitoring) and log management tools, NitroSecurity announced Jan. 14 that it has fully integrated its NitroView DBM and NitroView ESM products.

"Even in 2004, when I took the job as CTO of IPLocks, we were getting requests from a couple different SIM/SEM vendors to link our solutions together, as they saw the value," said Adrian Lane, an analyst with Securosis. "But the market was not ready. Now the consumer is starting to realize this as well, so there is a new push in this area to integrate or build DAM into their products."

DAM is a natural fit for SIM as it moves its focus away from correlation and auditing and toward analysis and security, Lane continued.

From a management perspective, combining SIM or SIEM (security information event management) and DAM centralizes monitoring and policy implementation.

"The example of a pooled application comes to mind, where an application is accessing a database, but multiple users are logging into the application," said Frank Hayes, vice president of marketing at NitroSecurity. "To the database, it's all coming from one user, but in reality it could be any number of users."

Hayes continued, "By analyzing database activity in a SIEM that also analyzes your application logs, you can bridge the gap to determine who really did what. That's only one example … another would be to determine the impact of other detected events: your SIEM detects that multiple bad log-ins occurred, followed by a successful log-in, followed by an IPS alert indicating a SQL backdoor exploit occurred.

"But what really happened? You know everything up to the database itself, but by adding the database activity to the picture as well, you can easily determine if the exploit succeeded, and if it did, what data, if any, was accessed," Hayes said.

Derek Brink, an analyst at the Aberdeen Group, said in a statement customers want vendors to provide integrated tools that address their security needs at a low cost.

"In the current economy, we see priorities shifting to reducing cost and reducing complexity, even while expanding security functionality," Brink said. "An integrated approach—such as NitroSecurity's integration of DAM and SIEM solutions—is well-aligned with these trends."