Item: IBM Guardium
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Guardium

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use IBM Guardium to protect and audit our databases. We monitor what employees are doing, who has access to the databases, and the type of connection they are making. With it, we achieve a higher level of data protection and safeguard applications that perform CRUD operations.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Database activity monitoring.
Alerts to SIEM.

Cons

Data Masking. It only works for varchar1 and varchar2, and it doesn't works for Sybase.
Data retention. the environment supports only around 7 days of retention.
Reports. To generate a report it spend a lot of time and if you try to run a long time period of data like 7 days, it crashes.
Agent stability — the agents sometimes suddenly stop working or require a lot of effort to keep running properly.

Return on Investment

It helps us analyze database threats.
it is very usefull than use only native audit logs from databases, because it centralyze the audit trail.

Most Valuable Capabilities

Data activity monitoring. It helps you to understand and manage the database usage with policys to SIEM.

Achievements Enabled

to checks who has access to the database and monitors the queries executed.

Alternatives Considered

CipherTrust Database Protection

IBM Guardium is the most popular option. IBM has a stronger brand name that conveys more trust.Technically, the Thales solution was more focused on encryption than on data monitoring.

Key Insights

Do you think IBM Guardium delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with IBM Guardium's feature set?

Yes

Did IBM Guardium live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of IBM Guardium go as expected?

Would you buy IBM Guardium again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

IBM Guardium is very useful for understanding threats to databases.It helps manage who is accessing the database and retrieving information from it.
On the other hand, IBM Guardium requires significant effort to maintain.Without a dedicated person to support the system daily, it may crash and stop working in less than a week.The only feature that works reliably is database activity monitoring.Other functionalities require a lot of effort and often present issues.A good example is the blocking feature.IBM Guardium can block connections based on rules, but even a simple packet loss can impact the entire database system.Therefore, I recommend using IBM Guardium primarily for activity monitoring,as it operates at the network layer rather than directly within the database itself.

Comments

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IBM Guardium - very useful for monitoring database activities.

Modules Used