Dataguise: Securing Million-Dollar Data Hubs with a Radical Pitch

Unfazed by the lack of employment opportunities at the beginning of the century, Manmeet Singh decided to part away from the traditional high-tech job settings and venture into the entrepreneurial world. Though Big Data was not so big at that time, early on it was the preferred choice of this budding entrepreneur. He says, “I knew Big Data wasn’t just another passing fad. It was here to stay and there was so much opportunity for innovation and fresh ideas. With that in mind, I bet heavily on Big Data and took the plunge in 2007 by starting Dataguise—a company that specializes in providing data-centric security for sensitive data across enterprise.

Dataguise offers companies a straightforward and automated solution to determine where data security is needed and then enforce it, within the shortest possible time. With Dataguise, enterprises no longer have to choose between business opportunity and compliance. Using the offered solutions they can detect sensitive data across heterogeneous data hubs (like Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR), warehouses and data stores, and then protect the data through masking, redaction or encryption. Dataguise is unique that it accomplishes this for both structured and unstructured data, whether the data is atrest or in-flight and whether on premise or in the cloud. This reduces the risk of migrating data assets and allows the company to benefit from the economy of scale delivered by technologies like cloud and Hadoop.

Big Data isn’t just another passing fad. It is here to stay and there is so much opportunity for innovation and fresh ideas

Dataguise not only helps businesses to locate and identify data assets in all the available data stores, but also protects the migration of data assets to enterprise data hubs or to the cloud, allowing the clients to create secure clones where sensitive data is masked, yet usability is maintained for analytics or other high-value business purposes. Additionally, with Dataguise, companies can track vital data movements across all the network domains, including any activity on the cloud, and estimate the company’s compliance risk profile based on out-of-thebox policies like PII, PCI and HIPAA, or custom policies that are defined by the organization.

DgSecure is one of the key products offered by the firm. This solution suite is extensively used to detect sensitive data across the entire business network, including the clients’ cloud deployments. It is able to locate and identify sensitive data across disparate data silos— including DBMSs, Microsoft SharePoint sites, NFS, and Hadoop clusters—and provides compliance experts with the intelligence they need to evaluate the company’s exposure risk. Depending on the types of data and repositories the clients are dealing with, DgSecure helps them to define and enforce the appropriate remediation policies, such as data masking, redaction or encryption, so that the data can be safely shared with employees and external parties, without exposing the business to compliance violations.

Recognizing that data constantly moves and grows, DgSecure delivers a 360-degree view of all the sensitive data assets and empowers enterprises to centrally manage and schedule detection and protection actions, making compliance enforcement transparent and automatic across all the data stores.

Moving forward, the company is planning to invest heavily in enhancing its on-premise and off-premise (cloud) solutions as well as addressing mobile data security. When asked to elaborate on Dataguise’s roadmap, Manmeet reveals simply that the company will continue to innovate and provide the best solutions for discovering, protecting and managing sensitive data, regardless of where it’s located. “My biggest dream is for Dataguise to become synonymous with Big Data Protection and be recognized as the default solution for data-centric security across enterprises. And that is definitely not a passing fad,” he added.