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.
"Satisfies audit requests, to give us an idea if anybody is accessing our privileged user IDs without our knowledge."
"The most valuable feature of the solution for the customers is the monitoring and full log of the database activity of privileged users."
"What I like about IBM Guardium Data Protection is that some of its features were deployed by collectors during the installation phase. The solution has collector and aggregator features, license installation, and even server patches that you won't find in other security providers. I like the collector-aggregator capabilities of IBM Guardium Data Protection where you install each component on separate servers, then on the aggregator, you collect all the logs on a central server or central console."
"The solution has definitely saved us time, because if you want to monitor this kind of vast environment of different products, it's going to take a lot of time. Let's say one database server has 100 database instances running on it; I don't need to install 100 data instances, I just need to install on the one database server and that will cover all of my instances on that particular database."
"Compliance Quick Start – Quick, GUI, step-by-step guide to automate compliance and give the customer a quick ROI."
"The platform provides data protection from internal and external threats."
"The most valuable feature is using the capture operation mode “S-TAP/K-TAP agent”, because all activities in the database are captured, including direct access to the database server by privileged users. This is useful because, even if the database server logs were deleted, the Guardium Collector has already stored such data to enable traceability of access."
"The most valuable feature I have found is the performance of client monitoring. The other competitors are unable to do this."
"It has a lot of different components that cover the needs of our customers."
"The tool's pricing is flexible and affordable for small and medium enterprises."
"The most valuable feature is the automatic reports on new databases, which gives us up-to-date inventory management."
"There are three major main use cases of this solution. The first one is to fulfill compliance regulations. Customers—especially the banks, health sector, and manufacturing—need to comply with the regulations in different countries. They have to fulfill compliance regulations around the privacy of data. In order to fulfill those requirements, they're using Imperva. It helps them to fulfill these requirements, and they are not fined by the regulators. That is the first use case why people buy Imperva."
"The cyber intelligence feature is the most valuable."
"As we are very sensitive to financial impacts, this product provides great protection for our organization."
"This is a stable product."
"The technical support for Imperva is super, super, super."
"Sometimes the performance is not good, and also sometimes we have sudden bugs causing difficulties."
"An improvement would be to make the pricing relative in terms of regions."
"The ability for Central Managers to talk to one another could be improved. I have 26 Central Managers and 26 silos which are independent."
"Setup can be complex. The documentation is in so many different locations, and a lot of times we have to leverage support and higher level resources to figure out the right steps to take."
"There are features like end-to-end and S-TAP mapping, and the ability to install policies for your configuration builder. They're not there, but we'd like to see them in the next version."
"IBM should add more database security features to Guardium. They could add user profiling, anomaly detection, and machine learning. IBM has user profiling, but they need to strengthen it. It should make sense for the users. It should remove most of the false positives."
"I would like to be able to upgrade appliances within major versions without needing to rebuild the appliance."
"I have already mentioned to IBM that a primary need is to improve the number of records in the reports above 65,535."
"The solution could improve by having more integration."
"Its reporting can be improved. The reporting feature is currently not good enough for our clients."
"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."
"Improvements can be made in data enrichment and enhancing the GUI (Graphical User Interface) for a better user experience."
"There is sometimes lost communication and it can take a lot of troubleshooting to solve."
"I have worked with IBM before, and I prefer its ease of deployment and management. Imperva SecureSphere Database Security has tricky deployment, whereas IBM's deployment is straightforward because of the UI."
"It would be better to update the solution by using a GUI that guides me, rather than through a CLI."
"Technical support for this solution needs improvement."
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IBM Security Guardium Data Protection is ranked 1st in Database Security with 16 reviews while Imperva SecureSphere Database Security is ranked 2nd in Database Security with 12 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.
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