Imperva SecureSphere Database Firewall for Global Computer Technology Company

One of the largest computer technology companies in the world replaced their IBM Guardium deployment with Imperva SecureSphere, to audit and protect their database environment. Switching to SecureSphere reduced operational costs by over 70%, saving the company $1.9M a year in recurring labor and support costs. This level of ongoing cost savings was a huge win for the company that operates with razor-thin margins, in a price-competitive industry. In addition to operating margin pressure, this Fortune 500 company had to address SOX and PCI-DSS regulations, on a global scale. The company’s over 100,000 employees developed, manufactured, and serviced the company’s products worldwide. For years, the company tried to expand their IBM Guardium deployment beyond the 500 databases it covered, but was hindered by the overwhelming amount of labor required. This meant that some critical databases could not be monitored, which introduced compliance and security risks the company deemed unacceptable. The high labor cost was mainly due to Guardium’s architecture deficiencies, which required a large number of virtual appliances, to cover the company’s 500 databases. The volume of virtual appliances made the deployment complicated and costly to operate. Furthermore, Guardium’s integration with the company’s Remedy change ticketing and workflow system was cumbersome, and presented many challenges. A huge amount of manual labor was associated with vetting false positives around Remedy change tickets; copying and pasting ticket events into emails to database administrators; and reconciling administrator responses with the events in question. The Guardium deficiencies ultimately required the company to employ a large number of full time staff, to manage the Guardium virtual server farm, and to compensate for the awkward Remedy integration. These factors, combined with Guardium’s support renewal costs, forced the company to evaluate other vendor