Running a data security program can be an overwhelming and, at times, a thankless job. With one foot in the security world and the other in the database world managing the sources that hold sensitive information, database administrators (DBAs) are under constant pressure to:

• Store more compliance- and data security-related information for longer periods of time.
• Keep costs in line.
• Deliver reports on operations, data security and compliance.
• Extract meaningful analytics and insights faster than ever.

Top Four Data Security and Compliance Challenges for DBAs

We have examined these responsibilities and identified the most significant challenges DBAs are facing. Below are the top four.

1. Exploding Data Volumes

IDC predicted that the global data volume will expand to 163 ZBs by 2025 — a tenfold increase from the current volume — with most of that increase originating from enterprises rather than consumers. As data continues to expand across databases, file systems, cloud environments and big data platforms, data storage demands are evolving at a breakneck pace. Data security solutions are scalable, but they’re not infinitely scalable, and this creates many problems.

2. The Never-Ending Queue for Data Security and Compliance Reports

It’s not enough to meet compliance and data security requirements. DBAs are also expected to extract data that stakeholders need and deliver it on-demand. That takes time because of the huge volumes of data being stored today in data security platforms.

Additionally, enriching data security and compliance insights with data from other sources, such as Splunk, CyberArk and ServiceNow, can increase the storage requirement and create more of a bottleneck. The pressure to deliver rich, targeted reports on-demand is large and growing, and it can take away from the main task of focusing on data security and compliance activities.

3. Moving-Target Data Retention Requirements

Compliance mandates such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) are now obligating organizations to store data for up to five years. The business’ own retention requirements add to data stores as well. Your data security solution was never meant to be a data storage solution, but these growing requirements create a new burden that can weigh it down. The result is slower performance as storage capacity and processing power are taxed, rising storage costs and frustration as you try to spend your way to better performance.

4. Making Sense of It All and Enhancing Insights

With data stored in so many places, it’s nearly impossible to cross-reference, sift through and deliver what management really wants: data security and compliance insights.

Turbocharge Your Sled With Greater Agility, Retention and Insights

Organizations with data security and compliance deployments that involve a lot of data can now enrich their IBM Security Guardium deployment with the power of a big data platform that is purpose-built for data security. IBM Security Guardium Big Data Intelligence allows you to augment your existing solution and quickly create an optimized security data lake that retains large quantities of historical data over long time horizons to deliver new, enriched insights while reducing costs and delivering nearly real-time reporting. Your data security solution still fulfills its pivotal role as a protection platform while the big data tool lends additional agility, supports longer data retention timelines cost-effectively and provides new context-aware insights.

A big data intelligence platform can also apply analytics and machine learning capabilities to all the information gathered and stored in the data lake to provide enrichment and additional context. Security teams can uncover new insights by evaluating this context-aware data over longer time periods. In addition, big data intelligence tools offer services such as noise cancellation and deduplication forensics, trusted connection profiling, privileged access reconciliation, data security-specific user behavior analytics (UBA) and more.

Another key benefit of big data intelligence is that it frees administrators to focus on data security and compliance issues. It also enables them to improve the organization’s security posture by providing authorized users, such as auditors and security analysts, with secure and direct access to the reports and enhanced insights they need almost immediately.

Case in point: Guardium Big Data Intelligence helped one customer retrieve a report derived from 16 billion records in approximately five seconds. Such solutions can help security teams perform analytics on context-aware data, optimize processes, free data by providing direct access to the users that need it, and reduce storage and operational costs. With the agility, retention and insights that big data intelligence provides, security leaders can unleash the full power of their data security solutions.

For more information on how Guardium Big Data Intelligence can help you meet your data security requirements and unlock context-aware insights, register for the Feb. 15 webinar, “Enriched Agility, Retention and Insights with IBM Security Guardium Big Data Intelligence.”