Crossroads today launched an enhanced version of its database-protection appliance that lets customers protect business-critical data from inappropriate access.

At the RSA Conference in San Francisco this week, the company unveiled its StrongBox DBProtector with support for Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and 2005 environments. DBProtector provides database security and prevents authorized misuse of business information through policy-based intrusion detection, prevention and compliance auditing.

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The DBProtector appliance connects to a Gigabit Ethernet network as an in-band or out-of-band appliance, where it inspects database transactions for inappropriate access and enforces security policies and reports on suspicious activities.

The DBProtector can be clustered for load-balancing and data availability purposes. DBProtector now works in IBM DB2, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server environments.

Further, the product now supplies a snapshot report that tells what's going on in the network in the form of activity by column or row. The product also has a traffic discovery capability, which lets IT administrators track the connections to the database and who is accessing data. For instance, the traffic-discovery capability will let customers tell which connections, tables and systems a particular user is accessing.

In addition IT can now save the audit trail to a network-attached storage device, as well as to internal storage on the appliance.

The Crossroad’s StrongBox DBProtector competes with Oracle software, which costs $120,000 per server CPU, according to Crossroads claims.

The product is expected to be available in April starting at $45,000, regardless of the number of supported database instances or server CPUs.