Tech innovation moves pretty fast. But as the landscape continues to evolve and expand, it becomes increasingly difficult for IT buyers to find the time do effective due diligence on prospective suppliers. Given the critical importance of security tools to mitigating serious business risks, the stake couldn’t be higher. This is where independent analyst reports come in. They can do much to share a vendor neutral perspective on the market, key trends and the product features IT security leaders should be looking out for.
That’s why we were delighted to read KuppingerCole’s latest Data Security Platforms analysis. It cites comforte as one of the seven “overall leaders” in this fast-evolving space.
Doing the job
Just as per technology and cybersecurity in general, the data security market is rapidly advancing. The KuppingerCole report itself is testament to this: it has been updated four times now in the past five years, and has been renamed from an original title of Database and Big Data Security. As the analyst explains in the new edition of the report, modern data ecosystems contain more than the database itself, and big data as a concept now is pretty much irrelevant – it is all simply “data.”
At the same time, the challenges of securely storing, processing and exchanging data have never been more pronounced. On average it costs nearly $4.4m to deal with a data breach today, rising significantly for organizations handling large volumes of records. Yet which data is most at risk? The report’s author argues that often it is data that appears at first glace to hold no intrinsic value. That is, the value comes when it is transformed into insight and information through processes like analytics.
For this reason, the ideal data security platform should be able to support processes like analytics without introducing new roadblocks, KuppingerCole argues. This is certainly the approach comforte has taken in partnerships with cloud-based data warehousing vendor Snowflake and others. We look to maintain data utility in such use cases without compromising on security.
More generally, the report argues that “an ideal data security solution is one that does its job and does not get in the way.” Business users simply want all their data to be safe – wherever it is and at all times. Tracking it across the enterprise, understanding which data is most sensitive according to internal policies and external regulations, and applying appropriate protections, is critical. This is where comforte comes in.
From strength to strength
KuppingerCole looks at “leaders” in four sections of its report: across product, market, innovation and overall. Leaders like comforte sell products which are “exceptionally strong in certain areas.” The comforte Data Security Platform is rated across five areas: security, functionality, deployment, interoperability and usability. It scores a maximum of 5/5 on the first four categories and 4/5 on usability. As a vendor, comforte also scores highly for innovation, market position, financial strength and its ecosystem.
The comforte Data Security Platform is described as a: “highly scalable and fault-tolerant data masking and tokenization solution which has grown into a full-fledged data security platform … tailored specifically for critical use cases that do not allow even minimal downtime.”
Among the highlights noted by KuppingerCole are:
- Speed and flexibility of deployment across hybrid cloud and as-a-service use cases, helped by dedicated partnerships with vendors like Snowflake
- Consistent protection at rest, in motion and in use for structured and semi-structured data
- Broad range of integration options for business apps and data flows
- Strong focus on maintaining regulatory compliance (eg PCI DSS and GDPR)
“Since our last review, comforte AG has not just significantly grown its market footprint and financial strength but invested a lot of effort into turning its capable but still fairly specialized solution into a full-featured data security platform,” the report explains. It goes on to note our incorporation of third-party classification technology to provide native capabilities direct from the platform. And increased coverage to support integrations with relational and NoSQL databases, data warehouses and cloud-native data stores.
That’s the story so far. And the good news is we’ve got plenty more to come.
