Secerno announced the availability of its Secerno.SQL database activity monitoring and blocking solution as a virtualized appliance on the VMware platform. This marks the availability of its appliance-based database protection in a virtualized environment, allowing enterprises the same database protection afforded by hardware yet with the utilization, management and cost benefits of a virtualized application.

Secerno's decision to add a virtualized database protection product, powered by its patent-pending SynoptiQ technology, is a response to increased customer demand and a growing trend by organizations to consider virtual environments as part of their infrastructure. Providing database security in a virtual environment gives organizations greater resource utilization, faster deployment times and the flexibility to have capability and capacity on-demand. With this offering, organizations can choose to deploy Secerno hardware appliances or take the benefits of VMware deployments without any impact to performance or manageability.

Secerno chose virtualization-leader VMware's technology platform based on VMware's penetration into more than 20,000 corporate customers. VMware will allow Secerno to offer full support for virtualized environments as well as roll-out protection through virtual appliances, enabling organizations to cost effectively protect a large number of databases. Enterprises will still have the full benefits of Secerno.SQL and will be able to deploy database protection quickly and manage all databases from a central point.

"This unique announcement comes at an exciting time for Secerno. We have just secured funding that allows us to respond to market opportunities and customer demand," said Steve Hurn, CEO of Secerno. "In this case, we are bringing Secerno to a virtualized environment to offer organizations more variety in their deployments and reduce their overall costs in terms of resources and expenses. Virtualization is emerging as a key strategy for companies, and we are delighted to be the first to offer this option for database activity monitoring and blocking."

Adrian Lane, an independent consultant at Securosis, the independent security practice founded by Rich Mogull, agrees that in a virtualized environment, it is even more important to verify that applications only interact with appropriate database usage: "We can and should do more to verify that the application that is connecting to the database not only has appropriate credentials, but appropriate usage ...This becomes even more important in a virtualized environment where some of the underlying network assumptions are thrown out the window."

Jeffrey Wheatman, research director at Gartner, says "With the growing trend towards virtualization we expect that database activity monitoring and prevention capabilities in a virtualized environment will become a growing requirement for organizations world-wide."