7 Ways Imperva Solutions Reduce the Cost of Data Security

As we push into Q4, economic uncertainty caused by rising interest rates, as-yet unchecked inflation, and a bear market is driving many enterprises to buck the trend and tighten cyber security budgets for the last three months of 2022.

The result is increased pressure to achieve data security while lowering the TCO of your data security technology investment, constructing a faster path to demonstrating ROI, and compressing time to value from years to weeks.

Fortunately, here at Imperva, we have a great deal of experience in this regard. It may surprise you to know that many customers tell us they never “budget” for Imperva Data Security Fabric, they cover the cost with the deep savings they realize on expenses like additional hardware, indexing costs, and labor.

Here are seven ways that Imperva can help you deal with budget concerns and get your enterprise ready for a more secure, efficient, and less costly 2023.

1. Recent reports indicate that 45 percent of organizations have experienced a misconfiguration incident in a production environment, and 38 percent admitted a known unpatched vulnerability issue. To help security practitioners quickly identify database misconfigurations and vulnerabilities in data repositories, Imperva has created Scuba. This free database vulnerability scanning tool detects security vulnerabilities and configuration flaws that may present risks to your databases. Not only does Scuba provide visibility into these risks, but it also provides recommendations on how to mitigate potentially costly issues that come to light. Download Scuba today.

Imperva Snapshot is a free security assessment tool for AWS RDS environments. Snapshot provides in-depth visibility into your AWS RDS data stores to help you get a deeper understanding of what data resides in your RDS, and where your RDS database security gaps are. You can use this intelligence to generate meaningful insights with zero performance impact on your environment and achieve safe cloud migration and usage. Addressing your security gaps while at the same time knowing if specific data is sensitive prevents expensive cloud security breaches. Download Snapshot today.

2. Reducing audit response time, automating data inventories, and increasing record retention are all critical for long-term data security cost reduction. Data discovery and classification helps you automatically discover, classify, control access to data, and avoid non-compliance issues while mitigating your exposure to risk and reducing costs. Learn more.

3. In pursuit of efficiency and innovation, development teams testing applications frequently spread sensitive production data throughout an organization. This increases non-compliance and data breach risks. To mitigate these risks (and their associated costs), organizations can eliminate the use of real production data in testing by masking sensitive data in pre-production environments. This process, known as static data masking, reduces the attack surface while still providing a realistic alternative for development and test simulations. Learn more about data masking.

4. As organizations need to account for more sensitive data in the cloud, maintaining data security becomes more costly, as more people and more specialized skills are required. Imperva Cloud Data Security (CDS) is a low-cost SaaS solution for AWS and Azure data stores that enables fast, agile posture management and protection for data assets in the cloud. This solution was purpose-built to help small- and medium-sized organizations, though any organization with limited resources that leverages cloud-managed environments can implement CDS and achieve real innovation while still maintaining the security of their sensitive data with little impact on their IT infrastructure. For more information, check out this blog.

5. Implementing Imperva Data Security Fabric (DSF) is, for many organizations, an example of “subtraction by addition” with regard to costs. A fabric is more flexible and works seamlessly with other “platforms” and architectures, anywhere. For example, DSF can run on-premises, on one or more hyper-scalers or public clouds, and on private clouds equivalently well. Most importantly – without requiring more work. So as the number of permutations of data architectures grows, the number of permutations of security controls does NOT have to grow – which radically simplifies your efforts to ensure that your security policies are applied to wherever data lives. The TCO doesn’t scale up and is even reduced relative to alternatives in our industry. Find out more about DSF.

6. Most organizations using database activity monitoring (DAM) tools like Guardium are under pressure to reduce the size and cost of their database footprint. At the same time, to make their current tools scale to the needs of the enterprise, they need to add servers, appliances, and agents constantly. In addition, traditional agent-based DAM tools cannot monitor activity in cloud-managed infrastructures. Imperva DSF was born in the cloud and built by the engineers and database security experts that created Guardium. Imperva DSF was purpose-built to modernize traditional DAM tools like Guardium while enabling organizations to preserve their investment in that system. Imperva can certainly help DAM tool users evolve their basic data monitoring activities into a more comprehensive data protection program and control or even reduce costs. Learn more.

7. Organizations that use Splunk for analyzing data activity understand that this is an expensive process. Using Imperva DSF to pre-process raw activity logs enables you to normalize, compress, and filter this data before using Splunk to ingest it. The result is only 5-30% of the original raw activity logs data needs to be indexed by Splunk. Your organization retains the same ability to comply with record retention requirements while using Splunk to index just a small percentage of the original data. Some organizations realize as high as a 95% reduction in indenting costs, without losing any of the power of Splunk analytics. Learn more.

These are just some of the areas in which Imperva solutions can help control costs with minimal impact on your business and help you deliver more comprehensive and effective data-centric security to your organization at the same time. To find out how Imperva can help you, contact us today.