Fortra's Vera vs IBM Security Guardium Data Protection comparison

"Vera encryption is the most valuable feature."

"The most valuable feature is using the capture operation mode “S-TAP/K-TAP agent”, because all activities in the database are captured, including direct access to the database server by privileged users. This is useful because, even if the database server logs were deleted, the Guardium Collector has already stored such data to enable traceability of access."

"The tech support is very knowledgeable."

"I like the reporting mechanism. It's very good."

"The purpose of EBM Guardium is to monitor database activity and who is accessing it. This is the most valuable feature."

"This is a multi-platform solution that consolidates everything and centralizes support for it."

"The solution has definitely saved us time, because if you want to monitor this kind of vast environment of different products, it's going to take a lot of time. Let's say one database server has 100 database instances running on it; I don't need to install 100 data instances, I just need to install on the one database server and that will cover all of my instances on that particular database."

"The vulnerability assessment is a valuable feature."

"It tests security to support SOX compliance."

"Additional improvement can be done as the issues are encountered."

"The additional improvement can be done as the issues are encountered."

"The most important requirements for us are integration with new database solutions and the ability to manage things like Jailbreak or something like that. Its reduction feature can also be improved. It has a functionality called reduction, which is like masking data, but it is just a replacement of characters. Sometimes the customer needs more than this. It would be good if it was more advanced or complete. We also have a problem with this solution because the IBM aggregator isn't working very well. IBM has created big data intelligence for Guardium, and occasionally, customers need three or four months of data, but they can't run it from the collectors. It can have a better dashboard and more pre-defined use cases for those customers who don't have any idea about data protection or don't have expert personnel in this area. For example, they can include five use cases for banks and five use cases for retail."

"We have had some issues with patches breaking things unexpectedly in our environments."

"Right now, we're in the development phase for IBM Guardium Data Protection, so I don't have any recommendations about additional features and room for improvement in the solution. We're very excited to work on IBM Guardium Data Protection because we are new to the solution, and we're still exploring product features. We're very excited about integrations and use case creation, and it's only after six to eight months that I'll be able to share my recommendations in terms of additional features the solution should have. We did find some difficulty in deploying IBM Guardium Data Protection here in Pakistan because of the lack of resources."

"An improvement would be to make the pricing relative in terms of regions."

"The one thing that I would like to see improved, but I don't think it's going to be in the next release, is its reporting capabilities. I think that's been offloaded to another third-party product that I think IBM actually endorses for that."

"Setup can be complex. The documentation is in so many different locations, and a lot of times we have to leverage support and higher level resources to figure out the right steps to take."

"I'd like to see a smoother GUI interface for the CAS agent - CAS does configurations on the database - to interface better with the vulnerability assessments."

"Can't be used for a NoSQL database, which is limiting."

"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."

"For IBM Guardium, licensing is very simple and straightforward. There are no issues I can speak of."

"One of the deployments that I know of had three databases, and the yearly fees are approximately $50,000 USD."

"It is a very costly product."

"The price of the solution could be better."

"Reasonable cost but could be lower."

"We haven't talked much about pricing and licencing. But it is not cheap for sure"

"Its cost is good. With the new metric of licensing, such as PDO not being available now, customers are expecting a good price for the solution."