Key findings in this report include:

• Legal data exposure as a result of the U.S. Patriot Act combined with illegal data exposure as a result of N.S.A. spying has created a legal environment in which E.U. companies can no longer consider hosting customer data and corporate intellectual property at U.S. cloud providers that are located within the U.S. or in other geographies with weak user privacy laws beyond U.S. borders.
• Countries within the E.U., such as the U.K. and France, are also guilty of unauthorized data access and spying and are therefore inappropriate countries to host data.
• Companies headquartered in the E.U. are required under Directive 95/46/EU to protect sensitive customer data, which they cannot accomplish in the environments created by the U.S. Patriot Act and government spying.
• Iceland, with its IMMI regulations and status as an E.E.A. state, is one of the few choices for hosting cloud-based data in compliance with Directive 95/46/EU.

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To organize the chaos, IT must look beyond a network packet’s site, port, or IP address and determine a security posture that relies on the complete context of data usage. A deep, thorough inspection of real-time network data can help provide the content awareness required for the granular management that a flexible, modern enterprise requires.

This report examines the shortcomings of traditional security and management processes exposed by device proliferation, an increasingly mobile workforce, and a movement toward cloud applications. It also demonstrates how a deeper understanding of application data in transit can help IT build more-flexible, business-friendly management procedures that continue to provide security and efficiency without disrupting productivity. The report concludes with best practices for testing application-aware network-security devices to gain a greater understanding of the value they will provide when deployed onto the enterprise network.

Consider the following:

• Traditional security and access controls are no longer capable of protecting enterprise networks yet continue to serve a purpose within a defense-in-depth strategy.
• BYOD and other consumerization trends bring new threats to the enterprise that must be addressed by innovating network-security and policy management.
• IT security leaders must validate and test these new application-aware network-security devices and identity-based policy-management systems.

Thumbnail image courtesy of opera3d/Thinkstock

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There is no reason to consider unseating RDBMS as the guardian of transactional data and its integrity, but organizations struggling to cope with the recent explosion of unstructured data must consider separate non-relational database solutions where warranted in order to enhance the data ecosystem with performance and scale.

The goal of this report is to explain the role of NoSQL databases within the context of the database market in general, to provide information regarding primary vendors and projects, to illustrate how NoSQL databases provide the most benefit to enterprise and web information systems architects, and to provide recommendations for evaluation, implementation and development.

Table 1: Overview of Relational and Non-Relational Data Stores

* We prefer to use this version of the term, rather than No SQL, as we believe that defining these solutions as simply “they don’t do SQL,” is outdated and, frankly, no longer accurate.

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