Quest Fuels Game Changing SQL Server Enhancements Through Low-Cost, Automated Compliance and Performance Monitoring Tools

• ApexSQL adds new range of capabilities to help IT teams audit and secure SQL environments, and achieve compliance with data privacy standards

• Latest Spotlight Cloud is industry-first SaaS platform for hybrid SQL Server environments, providing support for Azure SQL Managed Instance and AWS RDS for SQL Server

• New SQL Server capabilities to be spotlighted at the PASS Virtual Summit, happening this week

Quest Software, a global systems management, data protection and security software provider, today announced full integration of ApexSQL since it was acquired by Quest in April 2019, as well as enhancements to its SQL Server performance monitoring and diagnostics solution Spotlight Cloud. With ApexSQL integration, Quest offers a range of capabilities across its developer, DevOps, and operations tooling to help SQL Server professionals identify and secure sensitive data to achieve compliance with data privacy standards. New updates to Spotlight Cloud deliver the world’s first SaaS platform that enables deep performance diagnostics for hybrid SQL Server environments. The enhancements to ApexSQL and Spotlight Cloud – both a part of Quest’s newly unified Information Systems Management (ISM) portfolio – reinforce the company’s commitment to meeting SQL Server professionals’ needs both now and the future.

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“Quest ApexSQL offers a comprehensive toolset to address security and compliance challenges by simplifying complex processes across the full spectrum of development and operations for SQL Server professionals.”

When found non-compliant with regulations or standards like GDPR and HIPAA, or having personally identifiable information (PII) leaked due to a data breach, organizations can lose credibility, damage their reputation, and end up having to pay millions in fines. The result is database operations teams are facing growing pressure to ensure SQL Server environments are undergoing rigorous security monitoring and measuring against compliance guidelines. This is not an easy task, especially when compliance can quickly stagnate or bottleneck teams. However, these types of regulations and standards are only going to continue to grow, with Gartner predicting by 2023 that 65 percent of the world’s population will have its PII covered under modern privacy regulations. Quest’s integration of ApexSQL supports teams to prepare for this, now offering the most comprehensive database compliance toolset across the entire database lifecycle. Quest ApexSQL combines advances in its data classification and masking for DevOps pipelines with far-reaching new security health checks and increased granularity in its database auditing tools.

“Database security and compliance processes need to be automated, tightly integrated into DevOps pipelines, and then coupled with tamper-resistant database auditing post-deployment to ensure adherence to regional and sectoral standards while continuing to deliver great software,” said Heath Thompson, ISM President and GM, Quest Software. “Quest ApexSQL offers a comprehensive toolset to address security and compliance challenges by simplifying complex processes across the full spectrum of development and operations for SQL Server professionals.”

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This year has also seen an acceleration towards the cloud, with more databases moving there from on-premises. In fact, Gartner predicts that 75 percent of all databases by 2022 will be deployed or migrated to a cloud platform, with only 5 percent ever considered for repatriation. The future of databases is in the cloud, and with the newest launch of Spotlight Cloud, the solution delivers unmatched visibility into performance of on-prem, hybrid, and cloud SQL Server environments via an intuitive SaaS platform. Spotlight Cloud makes it easy for teams to solve complex SQL Server performance issues and reduce IT costs, and as a SaaS platform, enables reduced human labor on managing the monitoring tool itself.

“SQL Server environments are becoming more complex while remaining a critical component of organizations’ application architecture. It can be a struggle to keep up with this continual growth, and the shift towards the cloud simply adds an extra layer of difficulty on this,” said Venkat Rajaji, Sr. Director Product Management, Quest Software. “With Spotlight Cloud, development teams and database admins have critical capability they have never had before– a single SaaS based tool for monitoring on-prem, hybrid, and cloud SQL Server deployments with anytime, anywhere access to quickly identify performance degradation and isolate the cause of a performance issue.”

Key features of new, market-differentiated Quest solutions include:

ApexSQL

• ApexSQL Audit: Offers a tamper-protected auditing tool that can be configured to monitor SQL Server for changes in configuration, schema or data.
• ApexSQL Mask: Adds the ability to mask non-production data dynamically. Mask can search for sensitive data and can be integrated into Quest’s DevOps toolkit to orchestrate the obfuscation of sensitive data in a CI/CD pipeline.
• ApexSQL Manage: Provides over 30 new security checks to scan registered SQL Server instances for vulnerabilities. It also works with ApexSQL Audit to identify which instances in an organization’s portfolio are audited and which are left vulnerable.

Spotlight Cloud

• Azure SQL Managed Instance & AWS RDS for SQL Server support: Spotlight Cloud now enables customers to monitor on-prem SQL Server environments, IaaS, and, two of the most popular DBaaS platforms in the market.
• Workload Analyzer for on-prem & cloud environments: Quest’s unique innovative Workload Analyzer feature enables the breakdown of customer’s workload activity by various dimensions (e.g. user, SQL, Batch, database, etc.) and visualizes bottlenecks to shorten the time to restore optimal database performance.