Introducing Liquibase Secure: The Only Platform for Velocity with Confidence in Database Change

Key Takeaways

• Liquibase Secure addresses database security's biggest blind spot by automating policy checks, enforcing audit trails, and detecting unauthorized modifications before deployment. The platform provides continuous, tamper-evident auditability and compliance at the database layer, aligning with rising industry pressure for always-on controls and regulatory proof.
• Liquibase Secure integrates with CI/CD to automate access, approve changes, detect drift, and enforce separation of duties, preventing misconfigurations and untracked updates.
• Compliance is embedded through automated record-keeping, custom rule enforcement for major frameworks (SOX, HIPAA, PCI, DORA, GDPR, etc.), customer compliance requirements, SBOM generation, and real-time observability.
• AI governance efforts depend on trusted, well-governed data models—Liquibase Secure ensures schema-level controls and traceability, crucial for explainable, reliable AI adoption and regulatory accountability.

Introduction

Modern organizations face a persistent blind spot in database security: uncontrolled change. Liquibase Secure closes this gap. It detects unauthorized changes and maintains tamper-evident, version-controlled audit trails, stopping insider threats, misconfigurations, and schema-level risks at the source. With automated policy checks, every database change is measured against security and compliance requirements, becoming a first line of defense against unauthorized access and compliance violations—before deployment ever reaches production.

Liquibase Secure empowers teams to deliver schema changes with clarity, visibility, and control, reinforcing existing defenses and hardening databases before attackers find a way in.

The Problem: Database Change is a Security Blind Spot

The average data breach costs over $4.44 million. With global privacy laws and industry mandates rapidly evolving, data protection is now mission-critical for every enterprise. Every database change must be justified, logged, and fully auditable—because each change could mean the difference between innovation and catastrophe.

Most security tools protect data access at runtime, but very few control how data structures evolve. Without built-in policy enforcement at the point of change, misconfigurations and unauthorized updates can silently introduce risk long before they trigger runtime alerts. Security, compliance, and platform teams confront this risk daily: most database changes happen outside automated controls, lacking approvals, traceability, and enforcement. This leaves organizations vulnerable to misconfigurations, privilege abuse, and untracked structural changes that often precede breaches, audit failures, and regulatory penalties.

Why the Pressure to Govern Database Change Is Rising

Database change is now mission-critical to modern delivery, and the need to govern it has never been greater. Four trends are accelerating this urgency:

• Compliance Pressure. Global regulations have doubled in the last decade. Auditors now expect continuous proof of control across every layer, including the database (Chung, Handy, 2025).
  
  
• Release Velocity. According to the DORA State of DevOps report, elite DevOps teams deploy multiple times per day, leaving zero tolerance for downtime. Every change must be right the first time.
  
  
• Database Scale. Enterprises are running double-digit database platforms across cloud, SaaS, and on-prem. Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for Cloud Database Management Systems underscores the sprawl, while Virtana’s State of Hybrid Cloud shows four out of five companies use 2+ IaaS or PaaS providers, and Flexera finds organizations use 7+ clouds on average — not counting specialized application databases.
  
  

AI Governance. Forrester predicts that 40% of highly regulated enterprises will unify data and AI governance by 2025, underscoring that AI adoption depends on trusted, governed data foundations (Forrester, 2024).

‍Liquibase Secure: Enhancing Database Security Now and into the Future

Liquibase Secure is purpose-built to secure and govern database change. For teams who will not sacrifice speed for safety, it delivers developer productivity with built-in governance, continuous auditability, and enterprise-grade support. Every database change can now be fast, compliant, and trusted—enabling mission-critical applications to keep pace with business.

Liquibase Secure obliterates the blind spot most security tools leave behind. With policy checks on every change, airtight separation of duties, and tamper-resistant audit trails, compliance runs directly at the database layer—removing reliance on manual compensating controls. Security, platform, and compliance teams now gain control over every change by:

• Integrating role-based access controls, separation of duties, approvals and guardrails into CI/CD workflows
• Automating audit readiness with structured logs and tamper-evident history
• Shifting compliance left by embedding controls in development pipelines
• Detecting and preventing out-of-process schema changes
• Eliminating manual risk by standardizing and automating database deployments

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The New Standard in Database Change Management

Liquibase Secure is designed from the ground up for environments where time, trust, and data integrity matter most. It treats database code like application code—delivering secure automation, change insights, and developer productivity in one platform. It provides a unified control plane for database change that is fast, governed, and safe at enterprise scale.

Providing Enhanced Security for Database Change

Every database change must protect sensitive information, satisfy compliance, and support the agility of AI-driven business—and Liquibase Secure makes this possible. It integrates with CI/CD pipelines, captures detailed audit trails, blocks risky changes, and centralizes accountability. By automating drift detection and compliance guardrails, Liquibase Secure transforms changes from vulnerabilities to robust protection for enterprise data.

Liquibase Secure helps organizations:

• Apply consistent policy checks and drift detection across all environments
• Find and flag vulnerabilities—like missing indexes or exposed PII fields—before production
• Detect unauthorized changes with automated drift detection and alerting
• Secure credentials with secrets management and SSO integration (e.g., Vault, AWS Secrets Manager)
• Respond quickly to threats with expert support and prioritized remediation

Delivering Robust Compliance and Always-On Audit Trails

With international privacy laws and regulatory mandates hardening, compliance now requires proactive, automated control enforcement and continuous monitoring for unauthorized change. Liquibase Secure makes audit readiness continuous—even as development accelerates. Capabilities include:

• Continuous, automated capture of full metadata and change logs across all environments
• Custom rule enforcement aligned to SOX, HIPAA, PCI, SOC2, DORA, CPS 230, GDPR, and internal frameworks
• Complete observability and operational reports for who, what, when, and where for every change—streamlining audits
• Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) generation for risk and supply chain transparency
• Standardized deployment workflows to ensure consistency, accountability, and auditability

AI Governance Requires Trusted Change

AI is only as good as the data it consumes. Without schema-level governance, small inconsistencies in naming, data types, or validation rules multiply into biased models, fragmented customer profiles, and flawed predictions. A single undocumented column or missing index can cascade into poor business decisions that undermine trust.

Regulators and boards are responding. The EU AI Act is already in effect, requiring transparency and traceability for high-risk systems. Forrester predicts that 40% of regulated enterprises will unify data and AI governance in 2025, signaling that governance is shifting from best practice to board-level mandate.

Meeting these expectations requires governance at the database layer, the foundation that AI workloads depend on. The risks are not theoretical. In one documented case, an AI agent with broad permissions deleted database records because there were no schema checks or guardrails in place. Incidents like this prove that AI governance cannot stop at the model. It must include the schema changes that feed those models.

Liquibase Secure makes that possible. It enforces policy checks and version control on every schema change across more than 60 database platforms. Every update is captured in a tamper-evident record that provides full lineage, explains why changes were made, and proves compliance for regulators and auditors. Enterprises can guarantee data integrity before it enters AI training pipelines and respond quickly when threats or audit requests arise.

AI adoption depends on trust. Liquibase Secure delivers the foundation enterprises need to innovate quickly while staying safe, compliant, and explainable.

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Ready to bring security, control, and compliance to your database delivery pipeline?

Visit www.liquibase.com/demo

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Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What industry trends are driving increased focus on database change governance?

‍‍A: Key trends include a surge in global compliance requirements, faster release cycles (as seen in the DORA DevOps report), multi-cloud and database sprawl, and new regulatory demands for AI and data governance.

‍Q: How does Liquibase Secure integrate compliance into the database delivery process?‍

‍A: It automates policy enforcement, structured logs, audit trails, and approval workflows within CI/CD, thereby embedding guardrails and continuous compliance across development and production environments.

‍Q: How does Liquibase Secure support organizations facing AI governance challenges?

‍‍A: The platform ensures policy checks and version control over schema changes required for AI data quality, lineage, and explainability—connecting data integrity with emerging AI regulatory expectations.

‍Q: Which compliance frameworks and regulatory mandates does Liquibase Secure help address?‍

‍A: Liquibase Secure supports custom rules and automated evidence aligned to SOX, HIPAA, PCI, SOC2, DORA, CPS 230, GDPR, as well as custom policies and more. Liquibase Secure also automatically generates SBOMs for supply chain transparency and regulatory audits.