We performed a comparison between IBM Guardium Data Protection and Imperva SecureSphere Database Security based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: IBM Guardium Data Protection and Imperva SecureSphere Database Security have a similar user rating regarding ease of deployment, pricing, and service and support. In terms of features, IBM Guardium Data Protection reviewers felt the software wasn’t user-friendly. In contrast, Imperva SecureSphere Database Security reviewers felt the reporting feature needed improvement.
"Guardium does a great job of capturing data and having the ability of trying to pull it out and make sense of it. Using it for business applications is its biggest capability."
"We have integrated IBM Guardium with IBM Watson Curator. They access Curator to identify and correlate other actions the user is doing to determine if this is a legitimate action or not."
"Efficiency is key and IBM Guardium provides information in a heartbeat, but protects the data with military grade encryption."
"We now have the ability to begin to understand how people, applications, and service accounts are interacting with data to better protect it."
"There are different modules but the most valuable ones are firewalling and masking. Additionally, the auditing of the entire database is helpful, which includes all the activity of the database users and administrators. We can monitor everything and log as well."
"The most valuable feature is the GUI, the interface. It also interfaces well with REST API, if you want to automate some of the commands."
"It does not require our involvement to run it. It runs in the background and the people that do the reporting do so. The reports go to the directors who are in charge of the various data areas. It's pretty clean. Clearly there is some setup, but after you get it set up it just goes."
"We are using it to do a lot of data discovery from a data classification for structured data."
"The most valuable features of Imperva SecureSphere Database Security are vulnerability assessment, enrichment security policy, and security"
"The product’s most valuable feature is real-time highlights."
"Ability to send event monitoring and administrative activities."
"The most valuable feature is the Data Masking."
"A solution which does what other name brand products do for a lower cost."
"The discovery module provides good visibility."
"Imperva's most valuable features are ease of use and log correlation. I also like the ability to trace activity from the host machine to the server access, the user details, and the exact query that they executed. If a database administrator or application process executes a query on the database, people know exactly what was executed, including all the variables."
"The integration is great."
"The analysis part of this product could be improved. It's a very comprehensive product, so the features it has complement customer requirements. But I would like to see more emphasis on analytics, and it would be great if they added machine learning. They already have analysis insights, but a comprehensive analytical feature that's already incorporated into the solution would be very helpful."
"It would be helpful, and convenient to improve the Chat support."
"If IBM Guardium Data Protection could find a way to not have a lot of coding and development required to get the solution up and running it would be an advantage. The information of the agent could improve, which is necessary for us to monitor the databases would be a great benefit."
"Right now, we're in the development phase for IBM Guardium Data Protection, so I don't have any recommendations about additional features and room for improvement in the solution. We're very excited to work on IBM Guardium Data Protection because we are new to the solution, and we're still exploring product features. We're very excited about integrations and use case creation, and it's only after six to eight months that I'll be able to share my recommendations in terms of additional features the solution should have. We did find some difficulty in deploying IBM Guardium Data Protection here in Pakistan because of the lack of resources."
"Using the data in native Guardium is difficult, at best."
"The documentation could be better."
"Sometimes the connectors to the databases need to be manually updated and we have to configure them again, which is something that should be improved."
"The most important requirements for us are integration with new database solutions and the ability to manage things like Jailbreak or something like that. Its reduction feature can also be improved. It has a functionality called reduction, which is like masking data, but it is just a replacement of characters. Sometimes the customer needs more than this. It would be good if it was more advanced or complete. We also have a problem with this solution because the IBM aggregator isn't working very well. IBM has created big data intelligence for Guardium, and occasionally, customers need three or four months of data, but they can't run it from the collectors. It can have a better dashboard and more pre-defined use cases for those customers who don't have any idea about data protection or don't have expert personnel in this area. For example, they can include five use cases for banks and five use cases for retail."
"The solution is expensive."
"Imperva SecureSphere Database Security could improve the database defense feature called camouflage. This feature was responsible for the data mask but now it does not work well and we need another solution. All our banks have teams that are regarded with care and they need to mask sensitive data in order to provide testing to developers."
"The updates could be better."
"Its reporting can be improved. The reporting feature is currently not good enough for our clients."
"I'd like to see some sort of solution for storage."
"The only challenge I see is that SecureSphere is deployed on servers or databases which are held on physical infrastructure. However, there are databases which are hosted on cloud platforms and Imperva has a separate tool altogether for that, not SecureSphere."
"SecureSphere activity log can be used with Imperva CounterBreach in an effort to protect enterprise data from theft and loss caused."
"I would like to see integration such that there is support for different kinds of environments, such as on-premises versus cloud."
More IBM Security Guardium Data Protection Pricing and Cost Advice →
More Imperva SecureSphere Database Security Pricing and Cost Advice →
IBM Security Guardium Data Protection is ranked 1st in Database Security with 70 reviews while Imperva SecureSphere Database Security is ranked 2nd in Database Security with 52 reviews. IBM Security Guardium Data Protection is rated 8.2, while Imperva SecureSphere Database Security is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of IBM Security Guardium Data Protection writes "Provides visibility, has a single console that shows all information, and collector-aggregator capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Imperva SecureSphere Database Security writes "The fine-grained auditing available on the platform makes life easier and helps explain anything happening in your database". IBM Security Guardium Data Protection is most compared with Oracle Audit Vault, Oracle Advanced Security, DataSunrise Database Security, Vormetric Application Crypto Suite and IBM InfoSphere Optim Data Privacy, whereas Imperva SecureSphere Database Security is most compared with Oracle Audit Vault, DataSunrise Database Security, Trustwave DbProtect, jSonar and Imperva DDoS. See our IBM Security Guardium Data Protection vs. Imperva SecureSphere Database Security report.
See our list of best Database Security vendors.
We monitor all Database Security reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.