Data security presents a complex challenge to organizations. The value of sensitive data, and particularly customer data, has increased exponentially over time, but with it comes an increase in potential liability and exposure. Successful enterprise security and compliance strategy needs to balance out: the rapid growth of data within organizations’ environments; the complexity of regulations and compliance across industries; and the threat of internal and external attacks.

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with a Guardium implementation, Forrester interviewed three customers with multiple years of experience using Guardium. IBM Security Guardium offers a family of integrated modules for managing the entire data security and compliance life cycle, which is built on a single, unified infrastructure with a unified user experience. Guardium is designed to support and secure a wide range of data environments, including: databases; data warehouses; file systems; and cloud, virtual, and big data-based systems.

Five benefits of supercharging your data security and compliance efforts with a security-specific big data lake

This paper describes the roadblocks that organizations may face as they seek to take their data security and compliance efforts to the next level while juggling multiple priorities, including:

• The administrative demands imposed by the management of huge volumes of data.
• The need to retain those volumes of data over longer time horizons.
• The need to maintain or improve performance/speed of reporting.
• The need to provide direct access to data (“free” the data) to users with many different roles and responsibilities.
• The need to enrich audit data with other types of related security and compliance data while also performing complex analytics on this data to reveal new risks and/or insights.

The pages that follow will explore how organizations can take steps to address the hurdles above, and in doing so, reach new levels of efficiency and sophistication in data security and compliance management.

Software applications support the most sensitive and strategically important business processes of most enterprises. Yet application security is one of the most neglected fields of cybersecurity.

IT and business management typically have no visibility into the overall state of application security. Activities for assessing, prioritizing and remediating application vulnerabilities are ad hoc, fragmented and carried out at low levels in the IT security organization. Quality assurance and software development groups lack the knowledge and incentives to address critical vulnerabilities early in application development lifecycles, where testing and fixing vulnerabilities are most cost-effective.