Oracle expands compliance offerings

Proving they comply with a rapidly growing number of data integrity and security regulations is fast becoming a major headache for businesses.

This week Oracle debuted the Oracle Audit Vault software for collecting, managing and analyzing regulatory compliance data and identifying potential security risks and financial liabilities.

Businesses can use Audit Vault as a data warehouse to centrally manage compliance policies and collect audit data - such as what information employees are accessing in a database - from across the organisation.

The new software is part of Oracle's governance, risk and compliance product line. One way channel partners can build compliance solutions around the new product is by adding connectors for non-Oracle data sources, says Vipin Samar, Oracle database security vice president.

Systems integrators can add the software to their risk management services and security ISVs can build Audit Vault into their products for managing security threats, the company says.

One Oracle business partner that's already working with Audit Vault at customer sites is Tripwire, a Portland, Ore.-based company that monitors changes in customer IT systems and determines how those changes impact business processes and compliance policies.

Tripwire's software, Tripwire Enterprise, feeds information about IT system changes into Audit Vault for analysis, says Dwayne Melancon, Tripwire vice president of corporate and business development.

"For the longer term, we're working with 'Oracle' on how our system can be a consumer of the data they hold in Audit Vault," he says.

Oracle Audit Vault is available priced at US$50,000 per processor, with collection agents that bring data into the Audit Vault server priced at US$3,000 per processor.

The product currently consolidates and manages audit data from Oracle Database 10g Release 1 and Release 2 and the Oracle 9i Database Release 2.