Imperva to acquire jSonar: A New Generation of Data Security

I’m thrilled to announce that Imperva has entered into an agreement to acquire jSonar! We view jSonar’s incredible product and technology as perfectly aligned with our mission to protect data and all paths to it. Together, we will be able to deliver a fundamentally new approach to data security to help enterprises address today’s and tomorrow’s needs.

Imperva, a Pioneer in Data Security

Imperva was founded 18 years ago with the notion of protecting an organization’s digital assets and information with the convergence of application and data security. In 2020, the largest companies on the planet tell us that all security, including network and application, is ultimately about protecting data. To put it in perspective, networks exist to bring people to applications, and applications are responsible for reading and writing data. Imperva protects data and all paths to it – more comprehensively than anyone else in the market – from the network, through the application stack, to where data is managed – providing critical customer and analyst-leading solutions around security and compliance.

Today, data resides everywhere (on-premises, cloud service providers, third parties), in a variety of formats (structured, semi-structured, unstructured), and of course, some is highly sensitive, containing organizational and customer-related PII. At Imperva, we’ve consistently guided and protected customers with our data security framework:

• Discovery & Classification: where is the sensitive data stored across all my environments?
• Vulnerability Assessment: which databases have security gaps or are missing important patches?
• Access & Policy Management: what access rights do users have for specific data stores?
• Audit & Security: what and how much data are users accessing?
• Reporting & Insights: was this particular data activity abnormal?

The largest companies across all industries have adopted and implemented Imperva Data Security solutions that span this framework – Data Protection & Audit, Data Risk Analytics (DRA), Discovery & Assessment (DAS), and most recently Cloud Data Security (CDS). While the foundation of the framework remains strong, interesting trends have emerged over recent years.

5 Key Data Security Trends & Opportunities

I’ll start with the elephant in the room: COVID-19. The global pandemic has sped up the digital transformation by at least a decade and has accelerated enterprise adoption of cloud computing and storage. Organizations of all sizes are migrating and storing more data in cloud service providers than ever before. In conversations with CIOs and CISOs at many industry-leading organizations, they’re looking to wrap their arms around how data is managed and secured both on-premises and across multiple cloud service providers.

Second, more enterprises are embracing specialized data stores to solve specific problems. Across customers we protect, we’ve seen a surge of MongoDB, Snowflake, and even unstructured deployments. Some databases support an agent-oriented approach, while others require an agentless architecture. Providing security and compliance cannot be limited to a handful of database variants – support for hundreds of different data stores with a model to provide new coverage expeditiously is required.

Third, enterprises are simply drowning in telemetry from a deluge of security solutions. For our data security portfolio, we created DRA, to allow organizations to focus on anomalous activity instead of threat hunting raw log events. However, DRA is limited to just our portfolio. Today, organizations have to collect and aggregate data security telemetry across all stores and vendors, and then be forced to trade off between the costs of non-compliance and data storage.

Fourth, enterprises are trying to close the large delta between data collection/management and utilizing capabilities that derive value from the data itself. It’s one thing to collect data. It’s a completely different thing to do something with it. Some organizations struggle with usability and simply lack the tools, resources, and experience to go beyond monitoring and alerting.

Fifth, enterprises are generally struggling to automate the core processes of the data security framework. The accelerated transformation is pressing CIOs and CTOs to push internally for more automation across the entire security ecosystem yet few know how to achieve it. Teams working on scaling up a traditional data security program are constantly tasked with scaling up resources that they rarely get the bandwidth to automate workflows and other high-value tasks.

In continuing to build out our vision for data security while addressing the above trends, we looked at approaches other data security companies were taking.

Introducing jSonar

For us, one company stood above the rest: jSonar. The jSonar founding team isn’t a collective of strangers to the world of data security. In fact, the founders created Guardium, and have holistically shaped how we think about securing data. Instead of simply iterating on the past, the jSonar team took a disruptive approach to solving the biggest data security challenges all enterprises face.

jSonar has conceived of and built the data security platform of the future. The platform eliminates the need to distinguish between environments, applications, locations, etc. allowing for security teams to expeditiously support both the scale and complexity of data assets across diverse environments. jSonar quickly secures data stores no matter what kind (structured or unstructured) or where they live (cloud or on-premise) and provides a layer for estate-wide analytics and control. This dramatically simplifies the process of establishing policies for security, compliance and privacy, without development efforts or high-costs thanks to their hyper-efficient and extensible platform. Since security budgets and staff aren’t scaling at the same exponential rate of data, the jSonar platform is truly a game changer when it comes to democratizing security and making it available to everyone.

As we got to know the jSonar team, we quickly realized how visionary and complementary their approach was to our strategy. At the helm of jSonar is Ron Bennatan – a data security veteran with over 25 years in the space. Ron has dedicated his career to developing solutions that have transformed the way the world secures data. Throughout the company, we discovered a culture of innovation combined with an incredible understanding of the customer experience. Every product and technology decision was made to provide immediate value to enterprises of all sizes.

Imperva & jSonar: A New Generation of Data Security

With jSonar, Imperva will be able to provide comprehensive security to support the entire data lifecycle: a blend of agents and agentless to cover for hundreds of different data stores and environments, both on-premise and in the cloud, a strong UEBA coupled with a native SOAR containing thousands of integrations, unparalleled data retention, intelligent reporting, and many more capabilities. This acquisition furthers our vision of protecting all paths to data.

Going forward, Ron Bennatan will lead Imperva Data Security, combining both jSonar and Imperva’s data security products. This combination will form a large development organization dedicated to advancing data security, with many of jSonar’s capabilities being leveraged throughout the Imperva solution stack.

“We’re excited to join forces with Imperva and accelerate our mission to modernize data security,” says jSonar’s CTO Ron Bennatan. “Together we can help companies meet the demands of new use cases and platforms, providing ultimate flexibility for any customer: For existing Imperva and Guardium customers, for customers new to DAM solutions, for big enterprises and small startups, for cloud, on-premise, and hybrid, and for regulated and unregulated customers who just want to be safe and secure…in a way that is easy to use and provides real and immediate value.”

Enterprises need to understand what’s happening with data, where it’s stored, who’s accessing it, how much is accessed, and where it’s fundamentally going. With the acquisition of jSonar, we’re excited to be able to collectively serve these needs today and tomorrow.

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including receipt of required regulatory clearance, and is expected to close mid-October 2020.

Connect with a jSonar team member to learn more.