Forrester report suggests Imperva Data Protection delivers high value and rapid ROI

In mid-2021, Imperva commissioned Forrester Research to interview five current Imperva enterprise customers – two in the financial services industry and three in the insurance industry. The goal of the exercise was to gain insight into the economic impact of deploying the Imperva data security solution for typical Imperva customers.

Using this third-party snapshot of the composite results of Imperva deployments in five customer environments, Forrester created The Total Economic Impact of the Imperva Data Protection Solution report to suggest both the financially quantitative and qualitative benefits that Imperva can bring to an organization.

Get a free copy of the complete report here.

Common challenges for data security

The Forrester report surfaced three key challenges for data protection during the interview process. According to the interviewees, these pain points drove the adoption of a new solution. From the report:

• Need for improved data protection. The increasing amount of data brings with it the responsibility to make sure that protection against a wide variety of possible violations and breaches is adequate. In their legacy environments, the organizations were unable to triage the growing amount of data access behavior through anomaly detection, data classification, data entitlements, and vulnerability assessment.
• Lack of readily available and constructive analytics. Absent the capacity to easily access historical data, the organizations lacked visibility into data access activity they needed to accurately assess their data security postures and fulfill regulatory requirements. Without quick access to accurate analytics, the organizations faced lengthy incident investigations, unresolved requests, and inefficient auditing processes, often followed by penalties and fines.
• Increasing costly licensing and storage needs. Having to process a rapidly growing, daily inflow of log data, the interviewed organizations faced increasing, expensive storage and licensing needs that collected, aggregated, and housed difficult-to-access and sometimes redundant data. They sought a platform that would offer an improved compression rate, allow for longer audit data retention periods, and eliminate costly storage fees and appliance requirements.

Imperva data security – High value and rapid return on investment

Using the composite results of deploying Imperva in five customer environments, Forrester Research discovered these quantitative benefits:

• Received a net present value (NPV) of USD$4.1M over 3 years
• Experienced a return on investment (ROI) of 152%
• Realized payback in less than six (6) months

Forrester expands on the specifics of the $4.1M NPV in the report, providing details on staff time savings, cost reduction, and more. Here are some highlights:

• Security and compliance staff time savings of US$2.9M. This is a critical success criterion for today’s security technologies. Force multiplying products enable staff to do more in the same amount of time, resulting in a positive user experience and reduce alert fatigue.
• Infrastructure and storage cost reduction of US$1.7M. Through the use of Imperva as a pre-processor for database security events, organizations can reduce their storage footprint while elevating visibility and access. In addition, some architectures rely on aggregators for data handling, which can be removed. One company interviewed for the report told Forrester, “Imperva allows its users to reduce their infrastructure footprint through the elimination of legacy servers while simultaneously eliminating archive requirements by gaining multi-year access to live audit data.“
• Licensing reduction US$1.4M. Organizations with security information and event management (SIEM) solutions benefit through reduced indexing costs while retaining full access to database security data via virtual indexing. Interviewees noted that with Imperva, they have “greater visibility into all business unit data activity to which they can respond more quickly and with fewer security information and event management resources.”
• FTE resource reassignment of US$722K. Team members are able to focus on more strategic projects as a result of the reporting, analytics, orchestration and automation functionality.

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How can you apply this data to your environment?

If your company is exploring data protection and analytics solutions, you are likely challenged to provide a financial model that clearly shows the economic benefits of a new approach.

Economic impact reports such as this one should be considered a data point for internal research. The report’s transparent calculations enable you to understand the choices that were made and why, then if needed, modify them to align with your use cases.

For example, for staff financial modeling, salary assumptions can be adjusted based on geographic location. Or the infrastructure costs can be adjusted to reflect the actual number of aggregators in use.

Using the tables and assumptions in the report can result in major time savings.

Data protection is a fundamental capability to a comprehensive data security strategy

Sensitive, proprietary, and personal data require proper security context to protect them from compromise. However, a comprehensive data security strategy involves more than technology.

You must consider data security as a long-term plan rather than a short-term goal. Risk assessment, inventory, data discovery, and classification, as well as incident response playbook development and business continuity planning (BCP), are all important components. These take time to design and implement. Cross-functional visibility and leadership buy-in are essential for success.

Tooling helps reduce the manual effort behind the implementation and daily management. It can also reduce manual errors and ensure consistent policy application.

Imperva’s research into data breaches provides visibility into the threat landscape, stolen data types, and even the human factor behind a breach. It provides visibility into the fact that 50% of the 100 studied breaches began in the web application, with a detailed breakdown of how the initial breach occurred.

Preventing breaches may seem an impossible task. A properly implemented data security program will, however, greatly reduce risk and allow your organization to recover more quickly should it occur.

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To download the report, visit here.

To learn more about Imperva’s approach to data protection, please contact your Imperva Account Representative.