The Ingrian DataSecure Platform 3.0 from Ingrian Networks adds field-level encryption to the data privacy appliance. That means, for example, that a single credit card number could be encrypted and not only the entire credit card database.

''The value expressed by customers who have bought the product includes the ability to have a centralized, cryptographic appliance,'' says Karim Toubba, vice president of product management and marketing for Ingrian.

The alternatives today are hardware security modules that require a physical card in each server, which sometimes are not able to scale to meet the customer's requirements, or homegrown applications, which Toubba says is the greatest competition.

Other enhancements in the 3.0 release include centralized FIPS-compliant key management, integrated authentication and authorization, and robust logging and auditing.

Also, a new XML interface speeds deployment and adds sophisticated tools for cryptographic key management; authorization and authentication policies can be implemented more flexibly; cryptographic tools are provided for auditing, alerting and reporting; a range of algorithms and operations are supported, including RSA, DES3 and RC4.

The flexibility to protect data at the field level proves useful to customers, such as one in financial services, who described to Toubba a requirement to protect only nine of 200 columns of data on each customer in their database. Most of the data would be meaningless to protect, such as the number of times the customer accesses an ATM machine each month. But the customer number and account balanced information needs to be secured.

Pricing for the product starts at $32,500, and scales based on the number of application servers and databases connected. Annual software maintenance ranges from 18% to 22% of the purchase price.