GigaOm Radar for Data Security Platformsv2.0

1. Executive Summary

Poorly managed and inadequately secured data leaves organizations at risk of a data breach and increases the costs of storage and protection. Organizations have traditionally tackled this issue via “point” solutions—individual applications or solutions— for data loss prevention (DLP), governance, data protection, encryption, and threat detection. However, as data volumes and complexity continue to grow, so does the complexity of managing multiple solutions, further increasing costs and risks to a business’s data assets.

The risks presented by ineffective or overly complex data security solutions are considerable, as are the risks posed by insecure and unmanaged data. A data breach or the denial of access to data can have significant implications for an organization, from loss of productivity to financial penalties and reputational damage that can lead to loss of future business. Therefore, having effective data security measures in place should be a priority for all organizations, as the penalty for failing to do so is potentially severe.

Data security platforms (DSPs) have emerged to address this challenge. They bring together a range of disparate capabilities into a single solution to help organizations reduce the complexity of data security while improving the efficacy of the overall approach. DSP solutions aggregate data protection features such as:

• Discovery and classification: The ability to find data, determine its content and sensitivity, and apply classifications where necessary.

• Access security: The ability to monitor and control who should have access to data, ensuring it is protected appropriately.
• Auditing: The ability to find insights into data usage—who accessed it, when, and with whom it was shared.

• Usage and risk analysis: The ability to develop an understanding of data usage and identify situations when usage and usage patterns present a risk to data security.

• Secure sharing: The ability to share data appropriately, which may include using encryption, rights management, anonymization, and masking techniques to ensure data is protected.

It’s important to realize that data security is not an IT problem alone. It’s a business challenge as well. Successfully adopting a DSP solution thus requires buy-in from the entire organization, especially senior leadership. It involves carrying out a sizable project that recognizes data risk and responsibilities, identifies data owners, and builds policies around data classification, usage, and governance that are understood and adopted business-wide.

It’s not always clear what a DSP is, especially in comparison with data security posture management (DSPM) tools. For clarity in this report, DSP solutions are those that can enforce security settings relating to a given data set to protect it from potential threat and risk. In contrast, DSPM solutions primarily report on data security risks and how to address them rather than enforcing security controls on a data set. Only solutions that can enforce controls are considered for this report.

This is our second year evaluating the DSP space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.