Data security has been at the core of enterprise defense strategies for decades. However, the demands of digital transformation, business agility, migration to the cloud, and ever-increasing regulations, not to mention the barrage of cyberattacks and countless attack vectors, have radically changed the challenges of data protection faced by enterprise organizations over the past few years.

Moreover, with more and more data being created, changed, shared and stored than ever before, it’s now more critical than ever to understand what data organizations actually have, where it lives and how it’s being used — as well as understand its risk profile — in order to protect it.

All these challenges are the drivers behind the evolving landscape of vendors and tools in the data security marketplace. According to “The Forrester Wave: Data Security Portfolio Vendors, Q2 2019,” released this week, “As vendors expand their capabilities to approach data security in a holistic way, improved integrations and a range of granular controls that don’t impede employee productivity will dictate which providers will lead the pack.”

Download “The Forrester Wave: Data Security Portfolio Vendors, Q2 2019”

Can these tools provide the comprehensive, deep protection organizations need today? Can they support both structured and unstructured data, or different environments such as on-premises and multicloud? And can organizations successfully manage and integrate the variety of different data protection tools holistically — all while successfully reducing risk and protecting data wherever it resides?

To do all this, organizations need a smarter approach to data protection, which encompasses visibility, automation and analytics, delivered through a unified platform.

See With Insight — Understand Data Risk Everywhere

Visibility on its own is only part of the story. A smarter approach requires truly understanding data risk across the entire environment — from a security, compliance and business perspective. Only with this smarter insight can organizations take informed action to confidently reduce risk based on the implications to the specific organization.

Automate With Purpose — Reduce Risk With Less Effort

Automation is almost a given these days. While many solutions in the market tout automation, it’s critical to be purposeful and thoughtful about what, how and why automation is utilized for data protection. It is especially important to utilize automation to reduce risk — for example, with real-time, access-based controls — to help security and risk teams work smarter, better and faster, which is critical in light of the skills shortage we’re seeing today.

Scale for Innovation — Seamlessly Adopt New Technologies

Visibility with automation to reduce risk and protect data, however, is not enough without scalability. Today’s data protection challenges require an approach that enables organizations to scale as they innovate — move or expand deployments to the cloud (including multicloud deployments), build programs around new privacy regulations, adopt new technologies — so that they can avoid creating added operational complexity and ensure streamlined and agile processes.

With these three pillars of smarter data protection, organizations at different stages of maturity or with differing regulatory requirements can effectively understand their data risk, reduce it and scale across their current or future enterprise, wherever they are in their journey.

How Does IBM Security Guardium Ride the Wave?

We’re delighted to see IBM positioned as a Leader in “The Forrester Wave: Data Security Portfolio Vendors, Q2 2019,” which recognizes IBM Security Guardium as “a good fit for buyers seeking to centrally reduce and manage data risks across disparate database environments.” Forrester recognized IBM Security Guardium’s strengths as including “data intelligence that brings together data risk and business context, in addition to obfuscation capabilities such as encryption and dynamic data masking.”

Guardium’s strategy is to create an ecosystem of data-centric security solutions, and it adheres to IBM’s philosophy of supporting an open platform and enhancing value for clients, rather than requiring clients to rip and replace their existing portfolio of solutions to promote vendor lock-in. With IBM Security’s data protection solutions, clients can truly deploy best-of-breed solutions — both IBM’s and non-IBM vendors’ solutions — and support heterogeneous data sources (structured and unstructured data) across on-premises and hybrid multicloud environments.

What this means is that Guardium is a great fit for today’s modern enterprise organizations — especially those with hybrid multicloud infrastructures, those looking to migrate their data to the cloud and those looking for a smarter approach to data protection.

Download “The Forrester Wave: Data Security Portfolio Vendors, Q2 2019”