Rolling Review: Pyn Logic Enzo 2006

The Upshot Participants in our Rolling Review must be capable of monitoring, detecting and, when possible, preventing data extrusion from database servers. Pyn Logic says Enzo 2006 fills the bill through its use of two-factor authentication, user aliasing, and notification through syslog and SMTP. DBEP appliances, such as Imperva's SecureSphere, primarily work by sniffing content mirrored on a network SPAN port, and they accomplish intrusion prevention through mechanisms similar to a firewall or IDS/IPS. Enzo is software and takes a different approach, becoming the endpoint that clients communicate with and proxying requests to the server. This behavior allows it to provide granular access control but introduces a single point of failure and potential bottleneck. Enzo 2006 may work well for small organizations with few databases, but it could become an implementation nightmare for enterprises with thousands of clients communicating with tens to hundreds of database servers. And unlike other products in this Rolling Review, Enzo's controls are limited to who, what, where and when, without context or intelligence about data usage patterns. Pyn Logic Enzo 2006

Enterprises deploy database-extrusion monitors for many reasons. Insider threats. Data leakage from faulty Web applications. Outside attacks. Or, simply, compliance. Pyn Logic wants to cover all these bases and bills its Enzo 2006 as a jack-of-all-database-protection trades, with functions ranging from database-extrusion prevention to granular access control for database servers. To accomplish this, Enzo sits directly between the client and the database server, proxying all connections in both directions.

Because it's software, Enzo differs from the more common DBEP appliance model, and not always in a good way. On the plus side, it'll appeal to IT shops that just can't squeeze one more black box into the server room, as well as those interested in virtualization. Enzo runs on Microsoft Windows, so for our testing purposes, we installed it on Windows Server 2003.

Enzo directly accepts, processes and transmits requests to the database server. Although we found the process completely transparent to the client, this approach makes Enzo a single point of failure that could prevent access to database servers. The box could also become a performance bottleneck under heavy load. Test carefully before buying.