Information Insights LLC is a cybersecurity software reseller offering implementation and management services to help customers large and small protect their most valuable information from attack, loss and exposure. Pairing best-of-breed cybersecurity tools, such as Guardium Data Protection, with end-to-end data security strategy services—including Health Checks—managed services, and IBM authorized trainings, Information Insights helps build and implement data security programs for its clients.

Background

A long-time partner of IBM Security, Information Insights specializes in helping customers across industries design data security programs as well as deploy and manage Guardium data security solutions like Guardium Data Protection in a variety of environments, including cloud-first deployments.

Journey to AWS

Echoing a broader trend across the market, the experts at Information Insights have seen a growing preference among their clients to adopt a cloud-first strategy. Organizations seeking to simplify the management of their data environments find cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services to be a preferable option, since it allows them to reduce the complexity of their environments and outsource management responsibilities to the cloud service provider, thereby allowing clients to shift their human resources elsewhere.

Data security in AWS

AWS provides some native data security features that include encryption and key management, access control and activity monitoring. Despite these features, organizations moving to a cloud-first approach will still deal with the risk of owning sensitive or regulated information, regardless of where it is stored. For security professionals at these organizations, whose primary responsibility and mission are to ensure that their company’s sensitive assets remain as protected as possible, they may be inclined to deploy additional data security solutions to supplement the security capabilities native to AWS.

Despite the operational benefits of shifting their data stores to AWS, Information Insights’ customers also found that they must still contend with the requirements of data privacy regulations. Whether sensitive data is stored on premise or in the public cloud, an organization must still set adequate controls in place to ensure the data is protected to the degree specified by the applicable regulations. This can be challenging enough for data stored in your own environment, and shifting to the cloud can exacerbate compliance-related challenges. Information Insights’ customers sought a solution that could simplify and accelerate compliance auditing and reporting workflows across environments.  

Guardium Data Protection in AWS

Information Insights was able to help their customers meet these and other security and compliance needs by helping them deploy Guardium Data Protection to monitor and protect their databases hosted on AWS and to facilitate their compliance auditing and reporting. Guardium provided these customers with one data security tool that could provide consistent monitoring capabilities across data environment platforms, stored on premise and in hybrid multicloud.

Customers also benefitted from Guardium Data Protection’s ease of deployment in cloud environments. Since the solution provides users with both agentless and agent-based means of connecting to and monitoring databases, Information Insights’ customer simply deployed a containerized Guardium agent in the EC2 environment to connect it to Guardium’s central manager. The solution provides users with flexibility into what activity data is logged, and the ease of deployment over native logging has been impactful for Information Insights’ clients.

Another added benefit of Guardium Data Protection for these users is that it enables a separation of duties: the security department with the company manages the Guardium environment, separate and independent from the database administrators who maintain the data environment in AWS, thereby facilitating compliance auditing and reporting.

Guardium and AWS Components

• Guardium Data Protection
• Amazon EC2
• SQL Server database
• Snowflake database