IBM Guardium Vulnerability Assessment Reviews

We are still using IBM Guardium Vulnerability Assessment. We only use IBM Guardium Data Protection and monitoring, data protection and monitoring, classical Guardium. We only use classical Guardium for data monitoring and protection.

Guardium Insights is used for data aggregations and analytics. We use Guardium Insights for data aggregation from multiple IBM Guardium servers and Guardium collectors. We can replace the classical, traditional aggregator with the Guardium Insights solution.

We use IBM Guardium Vulnerability Assessment for Vulnerability Assessment. Vulnerability assessment is a component of Guardium, and we have the license for vulnerability assessment of databases.

The Vulnerability Assessment feature is quite stable and helps identify numerous vulnerabilities in databases. We rectify them as per the recommendation of the report which the IBM Guardium Vulnerability Assessment feature generates.

This feature is built-in and cannot be integrated with any other solution. There is no need to integrate this feature with other solutions. When we require scanning the databases, we use this built-in feature from our existing IBM Guardium Vulnerability Assessment setup.

The monitoring capability of Guardium is sufficient and meets our business requirements. The monitoring through Guardium is dependent on rules and their customization. One can customize rules as per their business requirement and monitor all traffic, every user, privileged user, and normal user.

We use the analytical functionality of Guardium, but the analytical functionality is not so powerful or flexible because it does not include the application user ID. It only includes the database user ID. To identify risky users, it does not support end users, so IBM must incorporate this feature into the built-in analytical engine of the Guardium.

There is only one problem I experienced while using Guardium: the internal database of the collector is MySQL, which is not so powerful or flexible. When you make a query in a MySQL database, it takes too much time to respond. IBM should replace this MySQL database with a more powerful internal database for the logging mechanism so that Guardium can collect logging data flexibly and ensure optimization.

My overall experience with Guardium is good. The only problem is that IBM must replace the internal DB, MySQL, with a more powerful enterprise-level database because enterprises use it at an enterprise level, and MySQL does not support optimally.

We have been using this feature for the last couple of years, three years.

We avail the technical support from IBM because we renew the license regularly every year from IBM Guardium Vulnerability Assessment. When we have any issue or requirement, we open a ticket on the IBM platform and get a response from the technical support team.

The quality of technical support is good and very good. An engineer from IBM who takes our query gets back to us promptly and provides a proper response with a solution.

Positive

IBM Guardium Vulnerability Assessment is an affordable solution. It meets the whole criteria of ROI, and a major example of ROI is in an organization where a lot of sensitive data resides. We can use Guardium's protection features to provide protection from unauthorized access, which is a very big benefit and returns the resource of investment.

We do not use IBM Guardium Vulnerability Assessment for data encryption or any other tool for analytics, or identity and governance.

We do not use any other solution except for protection and monitoring.

IBM Guardium Vulnerability Assessment is more popular than other solutions such as Imperva or Audit Vault. Most companies in the world use IBM Guardium Vulnerability Assessment because of its powerful capabilities, features, and flexibility.

The installation of the Vulnerability Assessment feature is not challenging. When you take the license and input that license key in Guardium, it gets enabled. You just need to configure the data source to a database and enter the name of that data source while configuring the Vulnerability Assessment feature, and once you make the configuration, you can easily execute these Vulnerability Assessment features to scan any database.

On a scale of 1-5, I rate this solution a 5 out of 5.

We are a full security base integration and application business. We help with implementation and deployments.

I used Guardium to help with a cloud migration to check and do some validation for a client's data landscape and services so that they made sure that they were all secure in overall posture and all the way throughout their data security life cycle. I helped with automating some of their other services, which provided another way of providing a more fundamental catalog discovery type of scenario. I also helped with using some activity monitoring for their on-premises and cloud data sources. 

It helped with some of the regulatory requirements. It also helped with some of the security analytics and analysis. It was worthwhile from that perspective.

It was not as easy to use. The user-friendliness of it was somewhat lower than what I was expecting. It was also lacking in terms of the ease of the setup. There should be an automatic agent for deployment.

It was also expensive.

It seems to work fine. I can't really say anything from that perspective. A customer purchased it, and they used it.

It was scalable. In terms of its users, it was based on Role-based Access Controls for services. Whoever is responsible for the encryption and modifying that from an engineering and architectural standpoint uses it for data security. 

For some, it could have been more straightforward. It wasn't as advantageous for the actual deployment of it. There should be an automatic agent to have it deployed through. 

In terms of maintenance, it wasn't self-managed, which caused it to be costly from a management standpoint.

One thing not advantageous for it was that it was a little bit more expensive. I would rate it one out of five in terms of pricing.

I wouldn't use it. That would be my advice to others looking into implementing IBM Guardium Vulnerability Assessment.

I would rate it a five out of ten.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the systems that I deploy for our customers. It is used to test systems for security vulnerabilities.

The most valuable feature is that it provides a simple English recommendation on actions that you need to take once a vulnerability is discovered. It provides very clear and concise instructions on the steps that you need to take to remediate the vulnerabilities that are found.

The performance is good.

The interface could be improved by having sub-groups of tests, ultimately making the process of collecting tests faster. As it is now, the test list is fairly long.

I have been working with Guardium Vulnerability Assessment for about ten years.

I have not experienced any issues with stability.

Scalability has not been a problem.

I have no complaints about the technical support. There is a large amount of documentation available for this solution.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are service providers, we don't use it internally. 

Where it is mostly being used is for enterprise clients, because they need to comply with all of the requirements, they need increased security and visibility. 

It's popular with enterprise clients who are more mature in their security implementations.

The interface is quite good, compared to what it used to be.

The reporting features are good and there are many built-in reports that can be quickly configured. 

The integration is very good. It is easy to integrate with LDAP allowing multiple users to use it.

The best feature is that you can see the activity in your data environment and have the ability to get the vulnerability assessments done quickly with scores that can be compared. You can then do some remediation to see the next score, so you can improve on your security posture.

The only problem is that some of the reports come up with blanks and missing data. In this area, it's a challenge, especially when there is a lot of traffic on the servers that you are trying to monitor. Sometimes the reports come out with question marks.

Building policies is not that easy. Some things are turned off by default, for example, displaying values. Maybe it's a good security feature, but sometimes the user finds it frustrating because they are expecting to see the result set.

The biggest challenge is in building policies because you have to involve users and stakeholders.

When you are training a user, there is a disconnect with the classroom-lead IBM training. The training is intensive. For five days you are hammered, but when it comes to doing it, it's a different understanding, so users find it difficult.

Pricing could be improved. Small firms shy away from IBM because of the pricing.

In the next release, I would like to see some third party support. A different way the developers can build the entire application. We would like to see more applications added. It is called IBM Security Exchange, so this is where you find that IT is going to develop some apps that can be run on Guardium. If you go to IBM QRader or SIEM for example, they have many applications that you can add to your existing deployment that are the same for Guardium.

I started with this product when they were still in version eight and now it's in version 11. I have a few years of experience.

I have been using this product since 2012.

It's relatively stable, but if you run into support issues, you have to wait for support to log in for you and fix it.

This solution is scalable, but the section that is not straightforward is when you have to add another node or connector. At times there are no hard limits. When you have a different connector, you don't know how much traffic it will take before you need to add another one. 

I would rate the support a seven because most of the time they sort out the issues.

You have to be on-site for them to be able to fix issues because they have to go through remotely.

The service is quite good.

In regards to the installation, it's quite easy.

The pricing is expensive. Sometimes when we proposition a client, due to the pricing they end up with competitors such as Imperva.

When trying to implement this product, it is better to have a dedicated IT resource to run with. Most organizations just re-assign the monitoring activities to other members of their team who are doing other things. They need dedicated resources for this tool.

This is a good solid product.

I would recommend this product.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.