Hit the Total Protection Jackpot

Data security presents a complex challenge to organizations. The value of customer data has increased exponentially over time, but so has the potential liability and security exposure. Combine this with the rapid growth of data within the environments, the complexity of compliance across industries and the threat of internal and external attacks, and you have a perfect storm that highlights the importance of creating a successful enterprise security and compliance strategy. Additionally, companies are struggling to understand how to proactively monitor and control user access privileges and gain visibility into what data is at risk. When you put it all together, it’s a complex task for which it is difficult to demonstrate a return on investment.

IBM commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying IBM Security Guardium as part of their overall enterprise data security and compliance strategy. Guardium offers a family of integrated modules for managing the entire data security and compliance life cycle which is built on a single infrastructure with a unified user experience. The purpose of this study is to provide a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of implementing a comprehensive data security strategy within your organization.

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Efficiently Securing Enterprise Data and Reducing Risk

To better understand the benefits, costs and risks associated with implementation, Forrester surveyed and interviewed several customers who have used the product for multiple years. Customer interviews and subsequent financial analysis found that a composite organization experienced these risk-adjusted ROI, benefits and costs:

As part of the analysis for the TEI study, Forrester asked the surveyed companies about the business challenges their organizations faced around data security. Answers revealed a number of common drivers for why the companies needed to invest in enterprise data security:

• Meeting regulation and compliance requirements;
• Increasing security and compliance around big data projects, such as Hadoop, NoSQL and in-memory;
• The focus on a security, compliance and data privacy strategy has increased and become more important within the organizations;
• A desire to become more proactive as opposed to reactive with respect to data security and compliance strategies;
• Minimizing the risk of audit failure occurring in the future.

Why Guardium for Data Security?

Prior to their investment in Guardium, these organizations managed data security and compliance using a patchwork approach with various tools, internally developed solutions and manual processes. These approaches were seen as inefficient and inadequate for today’s security and compliance needs. In each organization interviewed, it was revealed Guardium was selected over competing products because:

1. It helped the organizations meet compliance reporting and auditing requirements.

Guardium monitored privileged users and blocked unauthorized access, and provided coverage across many environments, including different data platforms, databases, data warehouses, Hadoop, big data, repositories, files and applications and protocols.

2. It provides improved visibility into the data.

It was found that, at times, organizations were not aware of all of their sensitive data, and Guardium helped them uncover potential sources of concern. As these organizations begin taking on more big data projects where the dangers of data security are magnified, a better understanding of where sensitive data lies becomes increasingly important.

3. IBM is a trusted leader in the data security and compliance space.

The organizations felt that working with a strong partner in the security space created a trustworthy environment. Additionally, the nonevasive design and the scalability of the solution means it can support environments of different sizes without a negative impact on the performance of databases or data warehouses.

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