The first step in protecting data is having the ability to govern it. Data security platforms (DSPs) empower organizations to govern their data more effectively by enhancing visibility, strengthening control, and ensuring compliance with internal policies and external regulations.
Today, the need for comprehensive data security solutions has never been more critical. The rapid adoption of cloud technologies, the increase in remote and hybrid work, and the ever-expanding threat landscape have organizations contending with unprecedented challenges in safeguarding their sensitive information.
In this post we explore the top five data security platforms leading the charge in helping organizations protect their most valuable asset outside their people—their data. These solutions offer innovative features and approaches to data protection, enabling companies to keep one step ahead of potential threats and maintain stakeholder trust. Each platform has unique strengths tailored to different industry and business needs.
What is a Data Security Platform?
DSPs safeguard and govern data across diverse environments, acting as centralized command centers that streamline the management of policies and permissions while preventing the clutter of conflicting data access rules. They serve as essential privacy management platforms, integrating data discovery, protection, and control into a single, cohesive solution that supports effective data access monitoring and management. Implementing a DSP into your organization’s security infrastructure significantly reduces breach risks and ensures comprehensive oversight of your data security landscape.
Here’s how:
- Centralized data governance. DSPs are crucial for establishing robust data governance and optimized data security controls. They centralize policy and permission management, helping to prevent the proliferation of disparate data access rules.
- Unified solution. A DSP integrates data discovery, protection, and control within a single platform. This helps security teams improve their monitoring and managing of access to sensitive data, thus minimizing the risk of unauthorized access.
- Holistic security insight. By aggregating data from various sources, DSPs provide a comprehensive view of your organization’s security landscape, detecting potential threats and offering insights into security events’ contexts.
The best DSPs include key capabilities like fine-grained access control and data discovery, classification, masking, and encryption. They offer centralized auditing and reporting that are crucial for informed decision-making and automate complex compliance workflows and policy implementations that enhance data utilization for strategic benefits.
Benefits of Data Security Platforms
As digital transformation and cloud migration become the norm, your need for expanded data security increases accordingly. A DSP provides the tools and capabilities necessary to meet these challenges head-on, ensuring your data remains secure and compliant across all platforms. Its benefits include:
- Consolidated control. A DSP’s centralized framework allows enterprises to enforce consistent security measures across all data sources, whether on-premises or in the cloud, ensuring all data is handled in compliance with organizational standards and regulations.
- Access management. Robust access control mechanisms enable organizations to define who can access data, under what conditions, and what actions they can perform with it. This helps implement the principle of least privilege, reducing the risk of data exposure.
- Data classification and discovery. A DSP’s data discovery and classification tools automatically identify sensitive data across the organization’s digital assets and classify it according to its sensitivity. This capability is crucial for applying appropriate security measures and complying with data protection regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA.
- Monitoring and analytics. DSPs use continuous access and usage monitoring to detect unusual or unauthorized activities, potentially indicating an insider threat. Analytics tools process the data to identify trends and vulnerabilities, helping organizations preemptively tighten their security measures.
- Compliance and reporting. Adhering to regulatory requirements is simplified with tools that generate reports and audits trails of data access and handling, demonstrating compliance during audits and reducing the risk of penalties.
- Incident response and remediation. In the event of a data breach, a DSP provides the appropriate tools to quickly identify the breach’s scope and impact, contain it, and manage the remediation process, helping organizations recover more swiftly.
- Encryption and data protection. Advanced DSPs use encryption to protect data at rest, in transit, and in use, safeguarding data against unauthorized access and leaks.
Best Data Security Platforms List for 2024
Internal data misuse is costly and, unfortunately, increasingly common. Choosing the best data security platform for its specific needs is critical for any organization. This list of today’s best data security platforms highlights trusted data security vendors that excel in protecting sensitive information.
1. Velotix
The inventor of a unique disruptive technology that enables enterprises to protect sensitive data, Velotix delivers AI-powered data security solutions that build, update, and enforce an organization’s data policy catalog. It automatically enforces the policies to ensure sensitive data is masked and/or encrypted based on the policy, enabling users inside and outside the organization to freely use it with the assurance that sensitive data is not exposed.
The platform’s modular approach to data access meets a company’s needs wherever it is on its data journey:
- Stage 1: Velotix maps out enterprise data and minimizes exposure to risk. It connects to your organization’s databases, automatically tags sensitive data, and correlates the information to existing permissions to highlight anomalous permissions.
- Stage 2: The platform enables secure and effective self-service data access across your entire enterprise. Data audit and permission management capabilities provide a comprehensive view of data usage, enabling better decision-making during the approval process.
- Stage 3: Velotix creates a single source of truth for all policies that govern data access. Its AI-driven policy engine automatically builds and maintains them.
Designed to provide maximum data utilization with minimum risk, Velotix gives businesses faster and safer access to valuable data that enables them to boost their competitive edge.
2. IBM Security Guardium Data Protection
IBM Security® Guardium® is a suite of data security solutions within the IBM Security portfolio. It’s designed to identify vulnerabilities and secure sensitive data, whether it’s stored on-premises or in cloud environments.
Guardium employs a zero-trust security model with capabilities that identify, classify, and monitor sensitive data throughout an organization. It provides real-time surveillance of data activities and sophisticated analytics of user behavior to detect atypical interactions with sensitive information. Its various data security and protection tools ensure the safeguarding of critical and regulated data across multiple platforms and environments.
Equipped to handle evolving data security challenges, key features include:
- Discovering shadow data, analyzing movement, and uncovering data vulnerabilities
- Monitoring data activity and accelerating auditing and reporting.
- Automating compliance policy enforcement.
- Centralizing data activity.
- Encrypting sensitive data in all states and across multiple environments.
- Integrating discovery and classification of structured and unstructured data.
- Identifying data environment vulnerabilities.
- Centralizing and simplifying encryption key management.
3. Microsoft Purview
A unified data governance solution that helps businesses manage and govern their on-premise, cloud, and SaaS data, Microsoft Purview creates holistic, up-to-date maps of an organization’s data landscape with automated data discovery, sensitive data classification, and end-to-end data lineage. Core attributes include:
- Metadata automation and management from hybrid sources.
- Data classification via built-in and custom classifiers.
- Consistent sensitive data labeling across SQL Server, Azure, Microsoft 365, and Power BI.
- Easy integration of data catalogs and systems using Apache Atlas APIs.
- Simplified data discovery via familiar business and technical search terms.
- Maximum business value of data management with Microsoft Purview Data Catalog.
- An enterprise-grade business glossary that eliminates the need for Excel data dictionaries.
- Interactive data lineage visualization to help understand data origins.
- Improved viewing and management of key metrics.
- Performance status updates.
By reducing the need for manual and custom data discovery and classification, Purview helps organizations save money by eliminating costs associated with maintaining personal systems and Excel-based solutions and by offering a “pay for only what you use” pricing structure.
4. Comforte Data Security Platform
The comforte Data Security Platform combines innovative technologies with simple solutions for data discovery and encryption to protect data from threats. It protects on-premise, cloud, and hybrid data at rest, in motion, or in use and uses automated discovery to identify sensitive data. The platform’s end-to-end protection for structured and semi-structured data prevents processing and analytic usability, and its encryption, tokenization, and masking features provide granular audit and control capabilities for regulatory compliance.
The platform, best known for its use in safeguarding global credit card transactions, is particularly suited to modern multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud setups distinguished by complex customer data flows where data security and privacy are mission-critical.
Key features and capabilities include security for AI and data analytics, a flexible, scalable, and resilient architecture, and support for modern CI/CD DevOps methodologies.
5. CipherTrust Data Security Platform
Thales’ recently launched CipherTrust Data Security Platform is available via a cloud-based subscription-as-a-service model. Powered by generative AI, organizations can use it to discover, protect and control their data across on-premises and cloud environments, simplifying their data security operations and protecting them against external cyber threats and other security risks. Users can also access a partner ecosystem for easy integration with third-party security vendors, databases, servers, and applications and clouds.
Backed by a Thales Luna Cloud FIPS 140-2 Level 3 hardware security module, key management deployment options include virtual machines (VMs), physical appliances, and hybrid clusters. As it automatically adapts to capacity changes, the security module eliminates the need for a data security infrastructure and ensures organizations maintain high availability and resiliency to meet SLAs.
Businesses seeking an SaaS solution to meet their growing demand for agility can use CipherTrust to simplify implementation of encryption and key management by reducing ownership cost and time to implementation. The platform’s machine learning feature powered by Google Cloud’s Vertex AI allows businesses to classify their data into various categories and subcategories and use “named entity recognition” to explore different types of information.
Meeting Your Data Protection Needs: Choosing the Best Data Security Platform
The Best Data Security Platform is the one that meets your organization’s specific infrastructure and security needs. For instance, banks and investment firms need a platform that helps them monitor and protect transaction data in real-time, reducing the risk of fraud and ensuring compliance with financial regulations. In healthcare, a DSP should excel at safeguarding patient information through strict access controls and monitoring. Those in the education sector require a DSP that can manage and secure student data, research information, and staff records across multiple campuses and systems, enhancing data integrity and privacy protection.
A Gartner Guide-recognized data security platform, Velotix improves network security monitoring, creating full-scale visibility into potential threats while helping to mitigate internal data risks like unauthorized access and theft. It classifies regulated data to ensure compliance, detecting and responding to threats in real time.
Velotix easily integrates with your organization’s existing data security tools, providing a holistic approach to data monitoring, threat mitigation, and incident response. As the only AI-based data security platform currently on the market, it ensures access is only granted at the right time to the right people for the right reasons. It’s the best solution for companies that want to optimize their security posture while ensuring operational efficiency.
