KuppingerCole named IBM Security Guardium an overall business leader in their Leadership Compass on Database and Big Data Security Solutions. IBM was also again ranked as a leader in all three sections: product, innovation and market. With this in mind, take a look at how KuppingerCole measures today’s solutions and why good data security is so important.

Big Data and Database Security Still Matter

Despite the growing importance of unstructured data, databases continue to be the preferred option for most businesses to store sensitive or regulated data. In order to protect sensitive data stored in databases well, you need the right solution to minimize exposure to risk while reducing the impact of potential attacks. Through methods such as data encryption, controlling user access policy, data activity monitoring and real-time threat response and repairs the enterprise can cut down on the impact of threats.

Data is the lifeblood of the modern enterprise. You can’t just lock it all down to protect it. That would keep it secure from attacks, but it would mean no one could use it. Security, data and privacy leaders need to balance access and protection.

We also live in a time of increasing privacy rules and consumer concern over how their data is being handled and protected. For large enterprises in highly managed areas, such as health care, life sciences, insurance, banking and finance, this is a critical concern. The company’s leaders need to be able to show promptly how they are addressing compliance.

For today’s security, privacy and data leaders, the stakes are high. They have to deploy the right solutions to balance their different (and sometimes conflicting) interests.

How the Report Ranks Vendors in the Data Security Market

Since vendors don’t exist in a vacuum, it’s important to understand how they fit in the wider market. The latest edition of the Leadership Compass follows the same structure and format of the previous two editions, released in 2017 and 2019. It ranks the strength of vendors’ solutions along several functional areas:

• Vulnerability assessment
• Data discovery and classification
• Data-centric security
• Monitoring and analytics
• Auditing and compliance
• Deployment and scalability

In addition to grading the overall strength of these functions, the report also grades vendors along five pillars: security, functionality, interoperability, usability and deployment. All of these factors go into ranking the solution sets as leaders in the Product Leadership and Innovation Leadership sections.

For Product Leadership, KuppingerCole analyzed the features and overall functions of the information security offerings. They give special attention to the functional strength of each solution.

When it comes to Innovation Leadership, they see this as providing what customers need to confront emerging challenges. As the threat landscape evolves, so too must the tools deployed to defend against attacks.

The report’s writer also takes into account the following dimensions when evaluating Market Leadership:

• Size of the company
• Number of customers
• Number of developers
• Size of the partner landscape
• Licensing models and platform support

First, Second and Third Time’s the Charm

For the third time in a row, IBM Security Guardium was ranked as a leader in all three sections — Product, Innovation and Market.

The report listed Guardium as an overall leader alongside Oracle. “Oracle and IBM retain their distant leadership just like last year, which reflect both the companies’ global market presence, broad ranges of database security solutions, and impressive financial strengths.”

One key difference between these two leaders is that, while Oracle provides robust offerings for cloud and on-premises database data security, their solutions are limited to Oracle’s own cloud and database platforms. Guardium, by contrast, is platform agnostic. Therefore, it can provide consistent data protection, including cloud security, on-premises data security and everything in between.

Register for the Leadership Compass to explore the report in full and learn more about the current state of the database and big data security market.