We love the Totally Transparent Research process. Times like this – where we hit upon new trends, discover unexpected customer uses cases, or discover something going on behind the scenes – are when our open model really shows its value. We started a Database Activity Monitoring 2.0 series last October and suddenly halted because our research showed that platform evolution has changed from convergence to independent visions of database security, with customer requirements splintering.

These changes are so significant that we need to publicly discuss them so can you understand why we are suddenly making a significant departure from the way we describe a solution we have been talking about for the past 6+ years. Especially since Rich, back in his Gartner days, coined the term “Database Activity Monitoring” in the first place. What’s going on behind the scenes should help you understand how these fundamental changes alter the technical makeup of products and require new vocabulary to describe what we see.

With that, welcome to the reboot of DAM 2.0. We renamed this series Understanding and Selecting Database Security Platforms to reflect massive changes in products and the market. We will fully define why this is the case as we progress through this series, but for now suffice it to say that the market has simply expanded beyond the bounds of the Database Activity Monitoring definition.

DAM is now only a subset of the Database Security Platform market. For once this isn’t some analyst firm making up a new term to snag some headlines – as we go through the functions and features you’ll see that real products on the market today go far beyond mere monitoring. The technology trends, different bundles of security products, and use cases we will present, are best reflected by the term “Database Security Platform”, which most accurately reflects the state of the market today.

This series will consist of 6 distinct parts, some of which appeared in our original Database Activity Monitoring paper.

  1. Defining DSP: Our longstanding definition for DAM is broad enough to include many of the changes, but will be slightly updated to incorporate the addition of new data collection and analysis options. Ultimately the core definition does not change much, as we took into account two anticipated trends when we initially created it, but a couple subtle changes encompass a lot more real estate in the data center.
  2. Available Features: Different products enter the DSP market from different angles, so we think it best to list out all the possible major features. We will break these out into core components vs. additional features to help focus on the important ones.
  3. Data Collection: The minimum feature set for DAM included database queries, database events, configuration data, audit trails, and permission management for several years. The continuing progression of new data and event sources, from both relational and non-relational data sources, extends the reach of the security platform to include many new application types. We will discuss the implications in detail.
  4. Policy Enforcement: The addition of hybrid data and database security protection bundled into a single product. Masking, redaction, dynamically altered query results, and even tokenization build on existing blocking and connection reset options to offer better granularity of security controls. We will discuss the technologies and how they are bundled to solve different problems.
  5. Platforms: The platform bundles, and these different combinations of capabilities, best demonstrate the change from DAM to DSP. There are bundles that focus on data security, compliance policy administration, application security, and database operations. We will spend time discussing these different visions and how they are being positioned for customers.
  6. Use Cases & Market Drivers: The confluence of what companies are looking to secure mirrors adoption of new platforms, such as collaboration platforms (SharePoint), cloud resources, and unstructured data repositories. Compliance, operations management, performance monitoring, and data security requirements follow the adoption of these new platforms; which has driven the adaptation and evolution of DAM into DSP. We will examine these use cases and how the DSP platforms are positioned to address demand.

A huge proportion of the original paper was influenced by the user and vendor communities (I can confirm this – I commented on every post during development, a year before I joined Securosis – Adrian). As with that first version, we strongly encourage user and vendor participation during this series. It does change the resulting paper, for the better, and really helps the community understand what’s great and what needs improvement. All pertinent comments will be open for public review, including any discussion on Twitter, which we will reflect here. We think you will enjoy this series, so we look forward to your participation!

Next up: Defining DSP!

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