IBM Bolsters Database Security with Guardium 12.0
September 27, 2023 Alex Woodie
A new release of the Guardium database security software is expected to help customers detect insider threats faster and better comply with audit mandates, according to IBM. Guardium 12.0 also brings expanded support for databases and easier management in hybrid cloud environments, the company says.
IBM bought Guardium back in 2009 in order to improve its capability to monitor databases for possible security violations and SQL injection attacks. The security software helped to automate database security tasks by implementing a policy-based control layer for transactions as well as anomaly detection routines to single out potentially criminal behavior that would otherwise blend into the weeds.
That original mission is still front and center with Guardium Data Protection 12.0, which IBM announced last week and began shipping yesterday. According to IBM, the new product enables companies to detect insider threats faster, “with near real-time insights.” Enhancements to the product’s Active Threat Analytics, Risk Spotter, and real-time trust evaluator (RTTE) components are instrumental in speeding up the time to detection, the company says.
According to IBM, Guardium 12.0 also brings optimized data classification processes thanks to new catalog search rules and an “exclude” schema. Users should see more automation of the vulnerability assessment processes thanks to a new integration with ServiceNow to share vulnerability data.
On the product management front, users will benefit from better visibility into Guardium managed units and patching levels from the central manager components, as well as new health notifications for third-party software running on the Guardium appliance. This release also brings improved load balancing and traffic detection at cluster level, IBM says.
The new release brings data protection capabilities to several more databases, including Couchbase Server 7.1; DataStax Enterprise 6.8.20; EDB Postgres v15.2; Elasticsearch version 8.6.0; Microsoft SQL Server 2022; Microsoft SQL Server 2022 Azure; MongoDB Atlas Database with external S-TAP; MongoDB v6.0; Neo4j Graph Database v5.6; PostgreSQL 15; Redis v.7; Teradata v17.2; and Vertica Big Data Analytics v12. Google Big Query gets support for HTTP/2 traffic while Postgres gets support for “query rewrite.” It also supports the Watson Knowledge Catalog via user defined function, and support for Oracle database connection modules written in Python.
The product already supports all the latest versions of Db2 for IBM i, Z/OS, and Linux, Unix, and Windows (LUW). While it doesn’t run on IBM i, Guardium can protect data in Db2 for i. Guardium has supported Db2 for i since 2009.
For more info, see the IBM announcement.
