IBM Acquires Guardium, Gets Real time Monitoring and Discovery Tools

The recently announced acquisition of Guardium by IBM (news, site) which is to be integrated into the Information Management Software portfolio, is the latest extension of IBM's business analytics strategy with investment to date reckoned to be close to US $12 billion.

Although no one is saying how much the Massachusetts-based database security solution provider has been sold for, there are unconfirmed reports that it could be as much as US $225 million.

Database Monitoring

Guardium was originally set up in 2002 under the name Defendo with its flagship product SQL-Guard providing database security assessment, access policy control and enforcement, auditing and regulatory compliance.

In a nutshell what all this means is that SQL-Guard watches who’s going in and who’s coming out of your database and, more importantly, what they are taking with them. If it identifies unusual activity it flags it to the systems administrator, or anyone else with clearance.

But it's not just Big Brother software. It can provide an important addition to eDiscovery tools. As it stands, its modules provide audits, real-time monitoring and tracking of database trails, and discovery tools. The software supports all major database platforms including Oracle, IBM's DB2, Sybase, Microsoft's SQL Server and MySQL.

Business Information Discovery

While some might think there is a little bit of overkill in this, especially considering the price that is being mentioned, this is about more than catching someone sneaking in and out of databases.

According to an IBM Global CIO Study, one in three business people make decisions based on information they do not trust or do not have. And IBM is hoping this investment will change that.

Apart from securing critical business information from prying and preying competitors, it also protects legitimate users from themselves and unintentional changes to information when either working within the system, or working externally.

Guardium will also be able to track exactly what information a company has and where and in what silo the information resides.

"This acquisition is another significant step in our abilities to help clients govern and monitor their data, and ultimately make their information more secure throughout its lifecycle,” said Arvind Krishna, general manager, IBM Information Management.

Last month we outlined how IBM is looking at business analytics, amongst other things to manage content and that they were doing this alongside their Information Management arm.

With the acquisition of Guardium, not only are they providing better security for that business information, but they are also giving users another tool to manage, track and control data.
 

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