Embarcadero Technologies ER/Studio 7.1 Facilitates Best Practices for Database Security and Data Model Design Quality

Business Wire, July 17, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO -- New Data Security Properties Provide System for Classifying Sensitive Information; Improved Validation Simplifies Model Review; Feature Enhancements Raise Data Modeler Productivity

Embarcadero Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:EMBT), a leading provider of strategic data management solutions, today announced Embarcadero(R) ER/Studio(R) 7.1, the latest release of its award-winning data architecture and database design solution for the discovery, documentation, and reuse of data assets through visual data models. In the 7.1 release, ER/Studio builds on its enterprise model management and collaboration capabilities to help organizations take a global approach to two important aspects of data management: reducing risks associated with data security and enhancing data model quality.

With ER/Studio 7.1, data architects can facilitate compliance and reduce the risk of inappropriate data use through the improved identification, classification, and communication of policies around sensitive data. In addition, the 7.1 release vastly improves model consistency and quality by providing validation rules to enforce company-specific standards and practices across the enterprise.

According to a recent Gartner report, "Organizations that are not using model-driven design tools in service-oriented architecture development, data integration design, application design or database design should begin the transition immediately, because they are already behind their competitors. More-aggressive organizations that already use model-based design tools could accelerate their approaches by securing the services of metadata integration service companies; this would be a highly manual, and possibly expensive, effort in the current environment."(Mark A. Beyer, et al., "Hype Cycle for Data Management, 2006" July 6, 2006).

"To be effective, I need to ensure that the developers leveraging the data model have clear, accurate, and up-to-date information for building reports from our data warehouse. Our diagrams and databases must be accurate, standards must be employed, and usage policies must be communicated," said Stefania Scott, senior computer database specialist, University of Arizona. "After reviewing other available solutions, we concluded that ER/Studio not only provides the most readable reports, it also provides the most comprehensive support for implementing standard practices across a complex model and for annotating models with critical metadata such as the security classification scheme. Additionally, we found that ER/Studio was the only solution to offer support for MySQL 5.0."

New Data Security Functionality Lets IT Organizations Classify Data Assets

To aid regulatory compliance and reduce the risk of data theft and tampering, organizations are formalizing data governance processes. In support of these initiatives, ER/Studio 7.1 introduces properties to categorize and label data and objects according the level of security and privacy that should be applied to that information. When coupled with ER/Studio's existing analytical abilities and comprehensive reporting, organizations can more easily discover and document sensitive data.

"A 16 year old hacker with an IDE and the knowledge to penetrate a corporate firewall is the last worry on the minds of CIOs in today's business environment," said Greg Keller, vice president of product management at Embarcadero Technologies. "In fact, the real threat to today's enterprise comes from within the enterprise -- specifically from those internal to the company who have nearly direct access to the actual data that resides in the databases. ER/Studio 7.1 puts an emphasis on data security to provide data architects with progressive abilities for quickly analyzing, notating and communicating the whereabouts of sensitive data, and then using this information to coordinate efforts with those who need to 'lock down' access where it resides. We know that these features and new productivity and validation updates will deliver significant advantages to our users, allowing them to accomplish their mission in less time with a higher degree of quality."

These security properties demonstrate Embarcadero's commitment to addressing the challenges of data security and follow the company's 2005 move into the arena with introduction of Embarcadero DSAuditor(TM), a data access and activity monitoring solution.

Enhanced Model Completion Validation Automates and Standardizes Review Process

Ensuring consistent standards and promoting best practices across models can be a time consuming manual process. To increase the overall quality and design fidelity of ER/Studio models, Embarcadero has enhanced its model validation capabilities to assist modelers with the quality assurance and peer review of models.

With ER/Studio's new model validation wizard, data architects can employ over 50 checks to ensure that models are completed using guidelines defined across the organization and consistency is enforced at an enterprise level. These checks are available for both logical and physical models. Data modelers can look for common quality problems such as missing object definitions, unused domains, identical unique indexes and circular relationships.