One of the vendors sponsoring the annual Gartner IT Security Summit brought along more than landfill-destined swag. Database security vendor Application Security (AppSecInc) used the Gartner event to release its own study -- conducted not by Gartner, but by security consultancy Ponemon Institute. The sponsored study indicates high demand for database security. It also finds that companies are more concerned with protecting their own sensitive information than with protecting their customer and employee data. Free whitepaper.

"Unless organizations directly protect their databases, everything else they’re doing for data security is on shaky ground," said Toby Weiss, president and CEO of Application Security, Inc.

Preliminary findings from the web survey of 649 corporate IT staffers show that many organizations -- and therefore, their employees and customers -- are indeed on shaky ground. Highlights from the study include:

• 49% of respondents said their organizations don’t monitor their databases for suspicious activity, or don’t know if such monitoring occurs. More than half of these organizations have 500 or more databases.
• Respondents to the survey have made corporate governance and regulatory compliance (including Sarbanes-Oxley and PCI) a low priority in 2007.
• Over 95% of respondents would value solutions that enabled them to understand and prioritize database security needs within their organization.
• Respondents ranked securing "intellectual property" (IP) as their highest priority, followed by securing "business confidential information". Those surveyed assigned a lower priority to securing "customer data" and the lowest priority to securing "employee data".

Respondents were most confident in their ability to negate hacker-related breaches. They had least confidence in their ability to defend against insider threats, including "data loss" and so-called trusted entities.

Download the complete preliminary whitepaper, "Database Security 2007: Threats and Priorities within IT Database Infrastructure", from the Application Security website, at the link below. Registration required.

Gartner also offers a report for purchase on a related topic, "Managing Critical Database Security Vulnerabilities and Updates for Oracle" (November 2006; G00144332) by Mark Nicolett, Rich Mogull, Ronni J. Colville.

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