• by Admin

Who's Really Accessing Your Company's Data?

Take a moment and think about this: how many AI systems currently have access to your company's data? Internal chatbots, agents pulling records from your CRM, models trained on customer data — all of them need data access, and most organizations honestly don't have a clear picture of who, or what, is looking at their data right now.

That's roughly the problem IBM is trying to solve with Guardium, its data security product. It's not new — Guardium has been known for years as a database activity monitoring tool — but its direction has clearly shifted to match a new reality: generative and agentic AI, constantly evolving regulation, and the long-term threat posed by quantum computing.

Why the Old Approach No Longer Cuts It

Data security used to be fairly straightforward: lock down the database, restrict access by role, keep an eye on who logs in. That story has changed. Enterprise data now lives everywhere at once — on-premises, across multiple clouds, on mainframes, and increasingly, feeding AI systems. Every AI agent granted access to that data effectively opens a new pathway that needs to be watched.

IBM frames the challenge as coming from three directions at once: increasingly autonomous agentic AI, regulation that keeps shifting, and post-quantum security risks threatening encryption methods we've long assumed were safe. Guardium is built to address all three through one approach — discover, analyze, respond: find sensitive data wherever it lives, understand the risk around it, then act before it becomes a problem.

Not a Single Product — a Whole Family of Them

What's interesting about Guardium is that it isn't one tool, but a set of products designed to work together.

Guardium Discovery and Classify finds and classifies sensitive data across both on-premises and cloud environments — a basic step many companies skip, even though it's foundational. There's little point having a data security policy if your own IT team doesn't know exactly where sensitive data lives.

Guardium Data Protection automates compliance, mitigates risk, and secures data in real time.

Guardium Vulnerability Assessment hunts for weaknesses in databases before outside actors get the chance to exploit them.

Guardium DDR (Data Detection and Response) provides real-time visibility and can respond to threats automatically the moment they're detected.

Then there are two products tackling an issue that rarely gets discussed but is becoming increasingly urgent: cryptographic readiness. Guardium Cryptography Manager helps organizations manage their cryptographic posture and prepare for the threat of quantum computing, while Guardium Key Lifecycle Manager centralizes and automates encryption key management. This might sound like a distant concern, but it's already pressing — data encrypted today could be cracked open by quantum computers a few years down the line if the encryption behind it isn't quantum-ready.

Why This Matters for Companies in Indonesia

For organizations preparing for tighter personal data protection rules — including the implementing regulation under the PDP Law set to take full effect in early 2027 — having complete visibility over sensitive data is no longer a nice-to-have. Regulators will ask: what data are you holding, where is it, who can access it, and how would you even know if something went wrong. Without tools like Guardium, answering those questions often turns into a manual process that drags on for weeks — and usually only happens after an incident, not before one.

The real question isn't "do we need data security tools" anymore. It's "do we actually know where our sensitive data lives, and who — including AI systems — has access to it." If the honest answer is no, that's exactly where to start.

If your organization still can't answer where its sensitive data lives or who — including AI systems — has access to it, that's the gap IBM Guardium is built to close, with tools spanning discovery, classification, vulnerability assessment, real-time threat response, and cryptographic readiness across hybrid and multicloud environments. Book a live demo to see how it fits your environment.

Turning a platform like Guardium into an actual working data security program still takes the right setup and governance around it. Cisometric's Compliance, Risk and Audit and Data Privacy Management teams can help map your organization's data risk and translate it into a concrete implementation plan — before small gaps turn into bigger problems.

Author: Ghea Devita

Marketing Communication PT Perkom Indah Murni