Cisco Invests in Guardium

WALTHAM, Mass. -- Guardium, the database security company, today announced a strategic investment by Cisco Systems Inc., the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet.

Guardium’s network-based technology protects sensitive information stored in critical systems such as Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, Siebel and custom enterprise applications. In addition, the Guardium solution enhances operational efficiency by providing a unified set of policy-based controls for heterogeneous, multi-vendor database infrastructures.

Cisco’s investment will allow Guardium to grow its leadership position in real-time database security and auditing. Guardium’s customer base currently includes major organizations in financial services, energy, manufacturing, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, media, retail and government.

“We are pleased about this relationship between Cisco and Guardium,” said Charles Kim, Information Security Officer, ING Investment Management. “Both companies provide important components of our critical data infrastructure. Guardium’s innovative network-based technology monitors, protects and audits access to key information assets at ING Investment Management.”

The Guardium solution supports a vision of adaptive, network-based security with application-layer intelligence for preventing unauthorized or malicious access to the corporate data center. This high-performance network continuously responds to security events as they take place, rather than later, when an organization may have already suffered damage. With the growth of Web-based applications and service-oriented architectures (SOA), it is now even more important to find new ways to protect confidential corporate information from both insiders and outsiders.

“Database activity monitoring and auditing is one of the most promising new categories of data security,” wrote Rich Mogull, Gartner research vice president, in Best Practices and Compliance with Data Security (October 2005). “These standalone appliances enforce separation of duties by segregating audit from administrative functions, and they allow alerting based on specific database activity. For example, if a database administrator runs a select query on the credit card field, or creates a new database user, a security administrator is notified. Thresholds for sensitive data can be set to detect if someone that normally accesses particular data starts accessing an unusual volume of that data.”

Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO)

Guardium Inc.