The news that Guardium has been acquired by IBM has been followed with great interest by those of us in the database security industry, as you can expect. What makes this acquisition so interesting is its timing. In 2009, the general business community became well aware of what we in the data security industry have viewed as the common threat landscape for years – insiders, third parties, organized criminal gangs, SQL injection attacks, etc. A mixture of technological advancement and economic instability provided the perfect threat storm that was 2009. This, however, is more than a “we told you so,” moment.
With this acquisition, we see database activity and transaction monitoring becoming central to any organization’s security plan. Nick Selby has written a great perspective on why this acquisition marks a change in the overall security landscape and predicts increased quality, better -integrated components, and cross-enterprise security programs. (Note: Secerno is mentioned in the article). In the coming years, not having real-time knowledge of your database’s activities and the ability to block threats will seem antiquated – almost like a company not having a firewall. We welcome this next phase of the security industry – and it’s been a long time coming.
