SUNNYVALE, Calif. - October 13, 2009 Fortinet® a market-leading network security provider and worldwide leader of unified threat management (UTM) solutions today announced a major upgrade of its database security and compliance product, FortiDB™. In the new FortiDB 4.0 release, Fortinet has focused on making deployments and maintenance faster and easier. New features include a more intuitive graphical user interface, centralized policy management, and new data collection methods for agent-based auditing. Additionally, the new architecture is designed to improve scalability and performance, which will help customers optimize their hardware resources and result in better total cost of ownership. Fortinet is also offering a trial version of the FortiDB vulnerability assessment (VA) tool for customers who would like to test the product prior to purchase.

ÏThis major upgrade to our FortiDB product line is designed to simplify and hasten the process of implementing or expanding a database security solution, especially in this environment of increased cybercriminal activity where databases are increasingly targeted, said Anthony James, vice president of product marketing, Fortinet. ÏIn addition, as there is greater pressure now more than ever in meeting regulatory compliance for normal business operations, weve enhanced the auditing methodology so that reports can be generated more quickly with minimal impact to system performance.

Product Feature Details

• Ease of Deployment/Management: New features of FortiDB are designed to enhance ease of deployments and management for vulnerability assessment and database activity monitoring (DAM), especially in enterprise environments and virtualized environments. For example, users can now define a set of monitoring and audit policies and apply them against a group of databases for much more simplified management. This will dramatically simplify the deployment of FortiDB for security purposes and also enable users to generate audit and compliance reports much faster.
• Enhanced and additional audit data collection: FortiDB 4.0 supports native audit-based data collection, which has been enhanced to minimize system performance impact. Additionally, there are new agent-based audits for data collection which doesnt require the native audit being turned on. Both these features result in a lower performance impact on the monitored databases.
• Scalability/performance: With the new architecture and improved data collection methods, one FortiDB system will be able to handle hundreds of millions of audit records a day, which represents a five to tenfold increase compared to the previous product version. This will result in lower deployment and maintenance costs. With better utilization and tuning of the internal storage of FortiDB, the performance of the alerting and reporting shows significant improvements.
• Free trial: Fully-functional version FortiDB VA is available for a two-week period and is downloadable at http://www.fortinet.com/leads/action/leadequest.do?categoryId=35.

ÏWe are expecting FortiDB 4.0 to be extremely popular with our enterprise customers because of its ease of deployment and improved scalability and performance, said Paul Barnwell, principal director at SecureDB Consulting. ÏWith the ability to manage hundreds of databases, our customers can expect lower deployment and maintenance costs.

The FortiDB 4.0 upgrade will be available on all FortiDB appliances beginning in November.