CA Data Content Discovery [EOL] Reviews

The most valuable feature of CA Data Content Discovery is the ability to recognize, in an intelligent and accessible way, which data sets on the mainframe contain sensitive data that needs to be protected from a governance and regulatory perspective. It then gives you the ability to easily monitor how those data sources are being used, and to alert you if they are being misused. This can save a company a lot of grief, both in terms of violating regulations, as well as in terms of being hacked for things like credit card numbers. This is a very important solution for some of today's most pressing security risks.

It allows people who are essentially technical, to go in and look at data from a business value perspective. They can recognize how regulatory compliance and other types of exposure help the company's business stay secure in a broader than technical perspective.

It is still the initial phase of being rolled out and it is already an outstanding solution. However, there is no question that as more companies implement CA DCD, that opportunities to improve the product will be identified.

I think the next big thing is going to be neural network types of intelligence. Recognizing behaviors in data that have characteristics that can’t be easily characterized by existing regulations, but have the potential for being sensitive for other reasons.

I have not encountered any problems with stability. What I have seen so far tells me this is a product that is pretty solid. One of the reasons for that this is that it runs entirely on the mainframe. All functionality and data runs entirely on the mainframe. Applications don’t have to access outside resources, thereby limiting exposure. Everything is on the mainframe.

Running in a mainframe environment, scalability is not going an issue. This is something that is going to work very well no matter how big your shop is.

I have used CA tech support a lot in my career and I am very impressed with them.

This is a brand new area on the mainframe. Until now, compliance relied on the people owning an application to tell you what their application does and what data it accesses. If they didn't know or if they didn't want to tell you, you could have serious exposure. Now, with this product, you can actually go in and look at the application data and see that this data set contains salary increases, this data set contains employee IDs, this one contains credit card numbers. This is extra sensitive data and we want to be watching and making sure people are not just moving it around in a careless manor. Data security affects us not only in terms of exposure strategically, but in terms of regulatory compliance and the possibility of being on the front page of the newspaper.

I have not installed DCD yet, but my impression from what I have seen is it should be a very straightforward setup. One of the reasons for that, is it is relying on existing products such as ACF-2, CA Top Secret or even IBM RACF. Those are already going to be installed properly so DCD is going to install on top of those in a way that should allow for a really simple, straight-forward installation.

I have to admit that this is such a new solution that I am not aware of anybody else offering something like this. Although they may, CA has a track record of having the very best mainframe security, so I would automatically think of CA first.

Do not wait for your company to show up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Now is the time to look into the solution, get it in place, to find out what the nature of your data is, who is using it, and to make sure that it is not going where it doesn't belong.

From a security perspective, the most interesting thing is the number of classifiers the product has right out of the box. When I first started with the product, it had 88 and now it has 133. So you know that CA has been working to add more classifiers by talking to their user community. That's very impressive from an end-user standpoint. It shows me what have they been doing since the product first was unveiled last year.

It improves our understanding of where data is as opposed to having data, but not understanding the relationship of the data to things like PHI and PII and PCI information. These are now becoming more and more critical in organizations. When you have 1000-plus level indexes within a mainframe space, it becomes very difficult to understand the relationship between the data and what it belongs to. It allows us to get more clarity.

I'm on the sprint team so it means that I'm constantly talking with the developers. The product comes with 133 classifiers as I stated, but I have about 168. I've added classifiers that were important to me that the product didn't have. Those are getting added in future releases of the product because, unlike other vendors, this development team listens. If I'm doing something other security practitioners would likely be doing it too.

Initially, on first release it had some problems. Scans that we would set up to wouldn't run, but those problems were resolved quickly by the development team. Since then, I haven't run into any situations where the scans don't work as published. More importantly, it allows us to write our own types of scans against our own classifiers. That's unique in the industry.

Because it runs in specialty engines and z/OS, it gives us a lot of flexibility regarding who we can distribute the product to.

We use technical support often. I know most of the development team, as well as the development teams of the other products that I use. I don't think it's a habit that people get into and they should get involved with their vendors more. A vendor can't make up these things. They can't fix problems or add new wealth to the product if you don't talk to them. I encourage all security practitioners out there to work with their vendor to get more features added to their product that concern them and their organization.

This solution is brand new. There's nothing like it on the market. Because of that reason and because it's in it its infant stage, it has a lot of bite to it. When you can take any product that allows you to execute 133 different features right out of the box without doing a thing, that's impressive.

I was involved in the initial setup and it all happened within a day. It's fast and clean. We were scanning by the end of the day.

I look for the stability of the vendor, flexibility, and Agile development. I like a vendor that listen to his customers and delivers what he says he's going to deliver.

This is a product that doesn't intrude in your system. It runs in a specialty engine. Try it. If you don't like it, I'd be surprised.