InfoSphere Guardium

IBM’s Guardium products are part of its InfoSphere platform, designed for trusted information purposes. The platform includes data integration, data warehousing, master data management, big data and information governance.

Within InfoSphere, the Guardium products are part of IBM’s overall information integration and governance strategy and are designed to help organisations with their data security and privacy needs. Within the Guardium products are centralised controls for data privacy and security, database activity monitoring, including data masking, data encryption and redaction, and vulnerability assessment. Guardium was originally acquired by IBM in 2009.

The Guardium products are designed to address the data security and compliance lifecycle. Core capabilities include protecting both structured and unstructured information in databases, data warehouses and file shares, to capture, analyse and monitor data traffic, enforce access controls, monitor and enforce policies, find and classify sensitive data, find and analyse vulnerabilities, and support forensic investigations. It offers a central management console and full audit capabilities for governance and compliance purposes, along with a dashboard for tracking and resolving data security problems.

Although IBM states that its InfoSphere Guardium products can help organisations streamline operations regardless of their size, these products are generally used by large enterprises, often multinationals with worldwide operations. It claims this product family scales to support tens of thousands of databases in an organisation, including those on-premise, in the cloud or in Hadoop environments for big data.

The Guardium family of products can be purchased in a modular fashion, allowing organisations to choose individual products from within the portfolio, as well as to mix them with components from any other vendor.

Designed to protect trusted information in databases, InfoSphere Guardium supports all major database management platforms and protocols on all the major operating systems, as well as a growing range of file and document sharing environments. It also supports a number of enterprise business suites, including those from Oracle and SAP.

InfoSphere Guardium is based on a multi-tier architecture, using connector appliances to gather data from systems under management, which are then collected in a central management console where the data is aggregated and normalised, providing an audit trail and secure management and enforcement of policies. No changes are required to the configurations of systems under management and all functions are managed in one central repository. For creating greater security intelligence, Guardium interfaces with a number of other systems, including LDAP directories for access control, email, change ticketing and SIEM systems.

Designed to protect trusted information in databases, InfoSphere Guardium supports all major database management platforms and protocols on all the major operating systems, as well as a growing range of file and document sharing environments. It also supports a number of enterprise business suites, including those from Oracle and SAP.

InfoSphere Guardium is based on a multi-tier architecture, using connector appliances to gather data from systems under management, which are then collected in a central management console where the data is aggregated and normalised, providing an audit trail and secure management and enforcement of policies. No changes are required to the configurations of systems under management and all functions are managed in one central repository. For creating greater security intelligence, Guardium interfaces with a number of other systems, including LDAP directories for access control, email, change ticketing and SIEM systems.

In addition to the normal sorts of training and support services you would expect from any vendor, IBM offers business services (application innovation, business analytics, business strategy, functional expertise, mid-market expertise), IT services (application management, business continuity and resiliency, data centres, integrated communications, IT strategy and architecture, security), outsourcing services (business process outsourcing and IT outsourcing and hosting), asset recovery, hardware and software financing, IT lifecycle financing and commercial financing.