Is your organization faced with pending audits resulting in long and tedious meetings to try to achieve compliance? Have you been hearing a foreign set of acronyms around the water cooler like HIPAA, SOX, GLBA and SAS 70? Have these new sets of requirements been causing consternation for your DBAs, Developers and Management? Have you been trying to figure how you are going to write the code to capture the data needed for the continuous audits in between the remainder of the company projects?
With the recent release of Entegra 2.0 from Lumigent, they offer the IT organization, specifically the DBAs, a new set of capabilities to audit all of the activity in a SQL Server database with real time alerting for IT Staff and reporting capabilities for compliance teams.
Entegra 2.0 Feature Set
Entegra continues to mature as a solid auditing solution and introduces the capabilities to capture SELECT statements and support for IIS (Internet Information Server). Entegra continues to deliver simplified management via a familiar MMC (Microsoft Management Console) interface. Real time alerts can be configured for IT staff on a variety of transaction types to address database, data and security issues immediately. The reporting capabilities are designed to assist in proving compliance or conduct forensics analysis against the current systems. All of these capabilities are inherently available with Entegra without the need to develop extensive code with complex logic, but rather deploy a solidified solution for enterprise SQL Server auditing.
Entegra Management Console
At the core of Entegra are three primary functions for auditing, collecting and reporting the needed SQL Server data. Via the Entegra Management Console you can point and click through a series of wizards to setup the audited SQL Servers in conjunction with their specific databases and tables. Next the collection process is configured to gather the transactional data from the audited SQL Servers and is uploaded to a centralized repository for reporting across the enterprise.
Entegra Alerts
Real time alerting is not only critical for proving compliance and intrusion detection, but also provides insight into critical production issues as they occur in the environment. Entegra offers the ability to configure alerts on a per SQL Server basis for critical database drops, object changes and security amendments.
Entegra Reporting
Entegra provides browser based reporting capabilities with the tools to review data across servers or drill down from SQL Server, database, table or key. The date for the report can be adjusted to only reflect a particular time frame. The interface can also be customized to include particular data attributes needed by your organization. Finally, the reports can be generated in HTML or PDF format to be saved or printed.
Entegra is able to capture all DML, DDL, Audit and Security statements from the database. Most notably are SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, ALTER and DROP statements. Security changes are also captured at the LOGIN and USER level. Finally, Entegra will provide the necessary data to ensure no gaps are present during the monitoring period.
For additional information about Entegra visit – http://www.lumigent.com/products/entegra/entegra.htm or for valuable white papers visit – http://www.lumigent.com/solutions/papers.htm.
Jeremy Kadlec is the Principal Database Engineer at Edgewood Solutions, (www.edgewoodsolutions.com) a technology services company delivering full spectrum Microsoft SQL Server Services on the east coast of the United States primarily in the Washington DC and Boston areas. Jeremy can be reached at 410.591.4683 or jeremyk@edgewoodsolutions.com.
Learn more about how Edgewood Solutions delivers databases at their finest at www.edgewoodsolutions.com.
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