By Johna Till Johnson, President & Chief Research Officer, Nemertes Research, johna@nemertes.com

Last week, privately-held Guardium Inc. landed $5 million in a second round of funding led by founding investor Cedar Fund and including Veritas Venture Partners and Stage One Ventures. Guardium provides an appliance that continually monitors and logs database accesses, providing detailed, searchable information about who has seen and modified data.

The investment highlights Nemertes’ belief that information protection, a key component of data quality management, is becoming increasingly critical for large enterprises. (Data quality management is the practice of validating, securing, protecting, and managing large volumes of data). Legislative initiatives such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA mandate severe penalties for data misuse or tampering, and IT executives increasingly say that compliance with these initiatives is a top priority. Over 70 % of companies that participated in Nemertes Research’s June 2004 benchmark on secure messaging say they are affected by information-protection regulations.

The complete Impact Analysis is available to Nemertes clients. For more information, please contact Chris Zimmerman at chris@nemertes.com