Data Security

The Top 10 Data-Centric Security Software

Discover the top data-centric security software with features like data classification, data-at-rest protection, and access controls.

The Top 10 Data-Centric Security Software Solutions include:
  • 1. BigID Data Security Platform
  • 2. Concentric AI Semantic Intelligence
  • 3. Symmetry Systems
  • 4. Dig Security Data Detection and Response (DDR)
  • 5. IBM Hyper Protect Data Controller
  • 6. Imperva Data Security
  • 7. Laminar Security
  • 8. Securiti Data Security Posture Management
  • 9. Splunk Enterprise Security
  • 10. Varonis

Data-centric security software solutions are designed to keep your data safe and secure. They differ from traditional security tools as they focus on protecting the actual data itself, rather than the network, hardware, or software systems that data resides on. 

As businesses store and process more sensitive data, this approach is becoming increasingly important to ensure that organizations can defend themselves against the evolving cybersecurity threats. These solutions implement techniques such as encryption, tokenization, data access control, data loss prevention, monitoring, and auditing, to allow organizations to better safeguard their critical data, both in transit and at rest.

Data-centric security software typically integrates with existing systems and applications, providing a seamless experience for users, while enforcing data protection policies. For these solutions to be effective, they need to classify data according to sensitivity, enforce necessary protection controls, and provide insightful monitoring and auditing capabilities for administrators. The best data-centric security software should offer comprehensive protection, regardless of data storage location (on-premise, cloud, or hybrid environments) and be easily scalable as data sets grow larger or more complex.

With such a range of options available on the market today, selecting the best solution for your organization’s unique requirements can be a challenge. In this guide, we’ve compiled the top data-centric security software solutions in the industry, based on their features, capabilities, and customer feedback. We’ll explore their key functionality as well as considering usability and integrations to help you make the best-informed decision.

BigID Logo

BigID is a data security company that offers machine learning-based classification and file analysis to minimize risk and lead proactive remediation. The platform is designed to cater to multi-cloud environments and provide data-centric, risk-aware security that scales with businesses as they grow.

BigID’s solutions help organizations reduce risk, protect data, streamline responses to incidents, and improve overall security posture. It utilizes customizable, ML-driven classification, allowing users to identify specific data types including critical, sensitive, and regulated data. The platform will also inventory all data based on sensitivity, type, policy, and risk. This approach helps minimize attack surface, reduce insider risk, and manage data lifecycle efficiently.

The BigID Security Suite includes a range of features such as data classification, risk management, data remediation, data labeling, data retention, risk scoring, access intelligence, breached data investigation, and data deletion. These features work together to provide increased data security, facilitate policy enforcement, and reduce the risk of data breaches and leaks.

Overall, BigID offers a comprehensive solution that enables organizations to enhance their data security posture and manage sensitive data across various environments including cloud, data centers, and hybrid settings. By leveraging advanced machine learning technologies, BigID empowers businesses to take a proactive approach to data security and risk management.

BigID Logo
Concentric Logo

Concentric AI is a generative AI data security company that offers an autonomous data discovery solution. The company’s Semantic Intelligence solution employs advanced machine learning technologies to autonomously scan and categorize various types of data, such as financial data, PII/PHI/PCI, intellectual property, and confidential business information. The MIND deep learning-as-a-service feature ensures that AI models are up-to-date, resulting in swift and precise discovery and categorization of data.

The Concentric Risk Distance analysis engine effectively identifies data that may be at risk due to factors such as inappropriate classification, inaccurate permissions, unauthorized access, and risky sharing within the organization. Through robust data access governance, organizations are granted a clearer understanding of the location and accessibility of their critical content. Concentric AI also provides centralized remediation by addressing permissions, modifying entitlements, and applying the correct classification to data for better protection against careless sharing, compromised users, and insider threats.

The easy deployment of Concentric’s agentless, API-based solution means that the platform connects to a wide range of data repositories, enabling governance of access to data regardless of where it resides. The platform processes both structured and unstructured data in the cloud or on-premises without requiring extensive security teams. The platform is quick to deliver value, minimizing any upfront configuration and deployment work. Concentric AI currently monitors 2 petabytes per customer, safeguards 1,000,000 users, protecting 2 billion files.

Concentric Logo
Symmetry Systems Logo

Symmetry Systems allows organizations to enhance their data visibility, enabling users to know what data they have, where it is located, who has access to it, and how it is utilized as it moves throughout the enterprise. Their solution also offers scalability to maintain control of rapidly growing data across various data stores and hybrid-cloud environments. Compliance is another key aspect to the platform’s offering. Symmetry Systems allows organizations to align their data security policies with regulatory requirements and gain insights into data storage and access.

Symmetry Systems’ platform is compatible with on-premise, cloud, and hybrid environments. It can provide fine-grained data visibility as well as deploying agentless scanning across all cloud and data store types, including AWS, Azure, and GCP. It also delivers prioritized risk identification, cloud identity management, and entitlement oversight to accelerate the adoption of zero-trust frameworks. To reduce supply chain risk, Symmetry Systems deploys customer-native solutions, ensuring that data remains within the clients’ environments.

Symmetry Systems Logo
Dig Security Logo

Dig is a data security company that offers a range of solutions to help businesses identify and mitigate data risks within their cloud environment. Dig’s main offerings include data detection and response (DDR), data security posture management (DSPM), data discovery and classification, and real-time data protection across any cloud and data store.

The Data Detection and Response platform can identify and halt ransomware attacks before they cause damage, as well as detect data exfiltration techniques used by cyber criminals. When used in conjunction with DSPM, the platform is able to continuously scan a business’ cloud environments, identifying and protecting shadow data that may pose a risk of a data breach.

Data discovery is another primary feature of Dig. It helps organizations to maintain an overview of their cloud data estate, uncovering potentially threatening data remnants, and providing instant visibility. Dig’s data classification further facilitates understanding the context of a company’s cloud data, determining how it moves within the organization, who has access to it, and accurately pinpointing sensitivity levels.

Data detection and response (DDR) provides real-time protection for a business’ entire cloud data estate. This is achieved through creating a comprehensive threat model and raising alerts to any security violations or suspicious actions. Additionally, Dig’s data governance feature supports data owner assignments, risk evaluations, and alerts for actions that may violate compliance standards.

The platform also delivers a wide range of security and compliance reports, enabling businesses to demonstrate their compliance to auditors, generate executive reports, and keep the entire organization informed about data security and compliance matters.

Dig Security Logo
IBM Logo

IBM Hyper Protect Data Controller is a data-centric security solution that is designed to protect sensitive information as it moves between various environments. The platform uses enterprise-wide policies and user identity management systems, thereby allowing the platform to provide field-level data protection and controlled access based on user needs. This means that different users can view different versions of the same data, ranging from masked to clear, depending on their access rights.

IBM Hyper Protect Data Controller uses a data-centric security model that packages data into secure Encrypted Data Objects (EDOs) before being transferring them to their destinations across the enterprise. This field-level protection allows for greater granularity and control over access to sensitive information. The EDOs can only be opened when they return to a Hyper Protect Data Controller, thereby ensuring that security is maintained. This also provides a centralized location for data revocation, enabling real-time monitoring of data usage and access.

In addition to EDOs, Hyper Protect Data Controller offers multiple features including a REST API for policy-driven access control, and a web browser-based management interface for managing policies, keys, and password labels. By supporting both predefined and ad-hoc data access, the solution caters to a variety of use cases and work environments.

IBM Logo
imperva Logo

Imperva is a data security company that helps businesses protect their sensitive data during all phases of cloud adoption. The platform delivers visibility into data activity, aligns security across environments, and offers deeper security and threat context along with unified data protection. This involves discovering, classifying, monitoring data activity, as well as enforcing policies.

Imperva’s centralized data security platform covers both legacy and modern cloud environments, providing automated detection, protection, and risk response for compliance and security operations. The platform offers enterprise-wide protection for over 65 data repositories across various architectures, including legacy, cloud, and hybrid environments. It also unifies data security and compliance through simplified processes and threat analytics.

With Imperva, businesses can mitigate data risks by gaining critical insights into sensitive data location, users, access, and associated risks. The platform allows for a better understanding of threats and quick response to fill gaps during incident investigations. By focusing on secure evolving data infrastructure, Imperva expands upon legacy database protection to secure modern cloud data architectures. Imperva’s data security solutions cater to a wide range of businesses, assisting them in maintaining robust data protection during the digital transformation process.

imperva Logo
Laminar Logo

Laminar is an agile data security platform designed for AWS, Azure, GCP, Snowflake, BigQuery, and SaaS applications. By combining cloud-native design, advanced AI, and cutting-edge research, Laminar offers visibility and control to protect sensitive data across organizations. The platform provides data landscape intelligence through autonomous discovery and classification, ensuring effective data security posture management and risk-based prioritization.

Through Laminar’s data access governance, the potential impact of a data leak is minimized (user and machine access to sensitive data can be controlled). The platform’s data detection and response features allow for prompt detection of data breaches, thereby mitigating potential damage. Laminar also helps businesses avoid regulatory fines and reduce costs associated with auditing by ensuring data security practices align with regulations and standards. This is all achieved while generating audit-ready compliance reports.

Laminar offers several benefits, such as fast time-to-value, reduced cloud costs, and improved security outcomes. The platform can be quick to implement of Laminar can be completed within hours, providing comprehensive findings within a week. The platform allows developers and data scientists to innovate and evolve their security systems, while also alerting users to any data policy violations. By continuously identifying abandoned, orphaned, and redundant data, Laminar helps reduce storage fees. This also improves overall data security, compliance, and governance initiatives.

Laminar Logo
Securiti Logo

Securiti offers a Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) solution that helps organizations minimize data breach risks, enhance data sharing security, maintain data privacy, and ensure compliance. By using Securiti, organizations can discover and catalog data assets across various environments including public clouds, data clouds, SaaS, and on-premises systems, including managed and shadow data assets. This is achieved by automatically registering datasets into structured and unstructured data catalogs.

Securiti utilizes AI to accurately classify sensitive data across various formats and provide contextual insights such as ownership, and regulatory requirements, as well as security and privacy metadata. By prioritizing misconfiguration risks according to data sensitivity, Securiti reduces alert fatigue and false positive detections. The DSPM solution allows organizations to remediate misconfigurations through data asset owner alerts or auto-remediation.

The platform also allows organizations to govern their data access, provides insights into users, roles, permissions, and locations, and helps identify anomalies. It also enables organizations to operationalize privacy management by automating tasks including privacy assessments, notices, consent management, Data Subject Rights (DSR) fulfilment, and breach analysis. The DSPM solution supports consistent data privacy controls throughout data lifecycles and prevents sensitive data sprawl across platforms such as Apache Kafka and Amazon Kinesis.

With Securiti’s DSPM, organizations can unify data intelligence and controls across various environments, reducing the cost, complexity, and ensuring that data privacy obligations are met. By offering a single data command center for security, privacy, governance, and compliance teams, the platform assists in managing data protection and compliance requirements.

Securiti Logo
Splunk Logo

Splunk Enterprise Security is a data-driven security solution that provides businesses with insights, threat detection, and risk mitigation. This platform uses machine learning-powered analytics to defend against threats and deliver high-fidelity alerts. This results in shorter triage times and increased true positive rates. By ingesting data from multi-cloud and on-premises deployments, Splunk Enterprise Security offers full visibility across the business environment, enabling users to quickly detect and monitor malicious threats.

Efficient threat investigations are made possible with Splunk’s built-in open and extensible data platform. This allows users to gather context and initiate flexible investigations with ease. Splunk’s platform is open and scalable, enabling it to meet businesses’ evolving needs and integrate seamlessly with existing data, tools, and content. Advanced threat detection is supported by over 1,400 out-of-the-box detections for frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK, NIST, CIS 20, and Kill Chain.

Additional features of Splunk Enterprise Security include risk-based alerting to address alert fatigue, integrated intelligence enrichment for a comprehensive understanding of threat context, and rapid response security content updates from the Splunk Threat Research Team. It also offers flexible deployment options for cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. Overall, Splunk Enterprise Security offers a comprehensive, efficient, and adaptable solution to help businesses stay ahead of threats and protect their assets.

Splunk Logo
Varonis Logo

Varonis is a data security platform designed to provide businesses with an automated solution for data discovery, classification, and labelling. The platform offers real-time visibility into data security and compliance posture, while continuously remediating data exposure and misconfigurations. Varonis ensures efficient data protection through its cloud-native architecture that can be deployed in minutes with zero overhead.

Key features of the Varonis platform include data discovery and classification, sensitive labelling, data activity monitoring, and automated control for data access governance, compliance management, and insider risk management. The system’s autonomous remediation and proactive incident response are supported by Varonis’ global incident response team, ensuring security issues are addressed promptly and effectively.

Varonis uses a range of advanced techniques including incremental scanning, proximity matching, negative keywords, OCR, and algorithmic verification to achieve accurate data classification. The platform also normalizes and enriches metadata from various sources, creating a unified audit trail and enabling efficient monitoring of data access events.

The platform’s security analytics and threat modelling capabilities automatically build user and device profiles, identifying unusual behaviors and providing valuable insights into potential risks. It is also capable of performing bi-directional cluster analysis as well as generating accurate permissions removal recommendations. These suggestions can be implemented autonomously or through an entitlement review process, thereby reducing the need for human intervention. By offering a comprehensive data security solution, Varonis enables businesses to effectively manage and secure their sensitive information.

Varonis Logo
The Top 10 Data-Centric Security Software