Oracle Readies Database Vault, Secure Backup

Companies running enterprise applications off databases now realize that DBAs and other IT professionals can "go in underneath the application, direct to the database, and get access to pretty much anything," Rudolph noted.

The new Oracle technology "lets you create realms that isolate user access to a subset of the data [for which they are authorized]," he said.

Exactly who sees which data and when is of crucial importance nowadays with heightened financial reporting regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley in place, according to solution providers. And increasingly, companies will have to show auditors that their information is cordoned off and viewable by only those who are supposed to see it.

Also at the show, Oracle will take the wraps off its own automated, secure backup-to-tape offering, ramping up its attempt to take more money away from partners such as Symantec/Veritas and EMC/Legato.

"Oracle today has a complete solution for backup-to-disk integrated to the product, as well as disaster recovery with Dataguard. What we'd been missing was backup-to-tape," Mendelsohn said.

"Customers often back up nightly to disk. But once a week, they'll make tape backups to ship off to Iron Mountain," he said.

"Bits coming off the disk are encrypted before being sent over the network to the tape drive," Mendelsohn added.

Secure Backup is available now for $3,000 per tape device. Mendelsohn said this pricing is aggressive compared with that of competitors, which typically charge per database backed up and per tape drive.

In other news, database rival Sybase on Tuesday said it's making its database mirroring technology available for Oracle databases. Sybase Mirror Activator so far bhas een available only for Sybase's Adaptive Server Enterprise.