Software aims to keep databases, Web apps under control

Securent Monday plans to announce the third version of its server-based Entitlement Management Solution software, adding a way to include fine-grained policy controls for several commercial database and Web-portal applications.

Until now, Securent EMS was used only to protect custom-built applications, says Howard Ting, director of product marketing. But EMS 3.0 adds agent software that can be used to enforce fine-grained authorization controls for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and SQL Server, IBM WebSphere, JBoss Portal 2.4 and 2.6, Oracle databases and BEA WebLogic Portal 9.2, among others.

“This Securent agent intercepts a database query, for instance, and it lets you filter out sensitive information, such as credit-card information,” Ting says. “You can set a policy on who can be exposed to credit-card information and enforce it.”

The Securent EMS software can be used to enforce authorization policy from the site level on down to the page level, and button and tabs, Ting added.

Some corporations contend that regulatory-compliance pressures have prompted them to take a fresh look at how they tackle the problem of user entitlements.

First American, which provides a wide range of mortgage- and insurance-related services in Santa Ana, Calif., uses Securent EMS to control entitlements associated with about 250 custom applications it developed, according to Gus Tepper, vice president of software development.

“What’s happened traditionally is all the entitlements were embedded in the application,” Tepper says. “We started looking at this problem on the heels of Sarbanes-Oxley where we are expected to keep a full audit trail on what people do with these applications. The argument is to abstract out the entitlements into a different application that administers it for everything. That’s what we did last year to get this fine-grained entitlement down to rows and columns of information.”

Tepper says he’ll be taking a look at EMS 3.0 to see what role it could play in his organization for restricting non-customized applications.

Securent EMS starts at $75,000.