According to a recent survey published by the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) and sponsored by Oracle, two-thirds of organizations don't have safeguards in place to prevent a database administrator from accidentally dropping a table or unintentionally causing harm to critical application databases - and most are unable to even detect such breaches or incidents. This is both a serious data governance issue and a regulatory compliance issue for most firms, especially in financial services.

"We chose Guardium because they have become the 'gold standard' for database security and monitoring," said Tamer Gamali, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), National Bank of Kuwait. "We needed tighter internal controls over our critical Oracle- and Microsoft SQL Server-based financial systems. We considered solutions based on native database auditing, but Guardium gives us automated, real-time security alerts along with full visibility into all transactions without impacting database performance. It also provides a scalable, cross-DBMS audit architecture for handling the massive amounts of transactions in our large-scale heterogeneous data centers."

NBK has been recognized as the "Best Bank in the Middle East" by Euromoney, the pre-eminent international finance magazine. In June 2008, the magazine described NBK as "a firm that is universally recognized as one of a handful of Middle East banks that sets the standard for others to follow." In 2006, Euromoney's CEO said that the bank is reaping the rewards of a strategy that has "transformed it from a strong national bank into a genuinely international financial institution."

Distribution Partnership Yields Success at Other Prestigious Financial Institutions

Guardium and StarLink also announced today that they have signed a distribution partnership covering the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Egypt and Jordan. In addition to the sale to NBK, this partnership has already yielded successful deployments at other prestigious financial organizations such as:

The largest stock exchange in the Middle East.

One of the largest Islamic banks in the region.

"We are seeing increasing demand for enterprise database auditing and real-time protection from organizations across the region," said Nedal Ahmad, Regional Sales and Marketing Manager, StarLink. "Given the strategic importance of safeguarding sensitive financial and customer data, our customers are looking for best-of-breed solutions that have been properly architected to address their needs both now and in the future."

Forrester Research recently named Guardium "a leader across the board," with "dominance and momentum on its side." In this comprehensive assessment, Forrester evaluated 14 large and small vendors across 116 criteria, with Guardium earning the highest overall scores for Architecture, Current Offering and Corporate Strategy ("The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Database Auditing And Real-Time Protection, Q4 2007" by Noel Yuhanna, October 2007).

In response to increased activity in the region, Guardium has also opened an office in Dubai. The Guardium office is located at UP House, Port Saeed Road, P.O.Box 43659, Dubai, UAE.