IBM Security Guardium

Background

Adaptive Systems is a Value Added Reseller (VAR) and long-time implementation partner of IBM Security, specializing in deploying and implementing solutions to help meet their clients’ data security, data privacy and compliance needs. Based in the United States, Adaptive services customers across industries—from financial services and insurance to telecommunications and retail—that are based throughout the United States and Canada.

Helping customers move to the cloud

Increasingly, the team at Adaptive is seeing customers shift to hybrid-cloud or cloud-first deployments. Clients are drawn to the ease of use, superior scalability and on-demand IT that cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services provide. Organizations want the flexibility to match their data deployments to the quickening pace of their business needs, in a sense being able to stand up servers for three months, as opposed to committing to a three-year deployment. As a result, the subscription model’s popularity continues to grow.

AWS—and vendors like it—have led the way in providing a platform to enable this flexible strategy. Customers that have traditional, on-premise data environments are now employing the services of firms like Adaptive to assist in their migration to cloud-first or hybrid cloud data deployments. With the onset of the COVID 19 pandemic in 2020, this trend has accelerated somewhat. 

Securing and monitoring AWS

Despite migrating their data to a modern environment, clients still face the same pain points as on their traditional deployments. They need to ensure that controls are in place to maintain the security of their sensitive and regulated information. They must enforce valid access controls; discover and patch vulnerabilities; encrypt data and monitor access to it by privileged users.

Platforms like AWS offer some native controls to meet these needs, yet for some security teams working with Adaptive, they want additional data security capabilities that go above and beyond what’s offered natively by their cloud service providers.

Alternatively, some customers work with Adaptive to deploy their data in a hybrid multicloud scheme. For these clients, who maintain some part of their legacy data environment on premises while standing up data sources in AWS and other cloud platforms, they want a data protection and compliance solution that provides the same capabilities equally across environments, and allows security teams to manage data security for the entire hybrid cloud deployment centrally from a single dashboard.

Making an impact

Guardium Data Protection helps client address these problems. The solution provides users with tools to monitor privileged users’ data activity at the data-source level, with advanced analytics to identify and block or quarantine suspicious activity, helping to stop both insider or outsider threats in their tracks. Guardium Data Protection offers agent-based and agentless options to connect to data sources, allowing users to use the solution to monitor a wide range of on-premise, private and public cloud data storage options.

Guardium Data Protection’s monitoring capabilities help accelerate the compliance auditing and reporting process. By providing customizable, pre-built templates for major privacy regulations, such as GDPR and HIPAA, users can automate and accelerate much of what is normally a resource- and time-intensive process.

Moreover, as a platform agnostic solution, Guardium Data Protection extends its monitoring and compliance reporting capabilities equally across data sources and platforms—regardless of whether they are deployed on premises, in private or in public cloud. Adaptive’s customers who already use Guardium to protect their legacy on-premise solution and are in the middle of modernizing their data environments, in particular have benefited greatly from not needing to learn and deploy a new tool set to protect the servers they host in AWS environments. Being able to incorporate the new data sources into their existing data security system makes their digital transformation that much easier.

Components used in this deployment

• Guardium Data Protection
• AWS EC2
• AWS Cloud Trail
• AWS Cloud Watch
• AWS RDS
• AWS EKS
• AWS ELB
• AWS VPC
• AWS IAM
• AWS S3