Gartner Magic Quadrant: Data Masking - Leaders, Challengers and More

Data breaches, a surveillance state and compliance requirements have more organizations looking at security technologies that go beyond firewalls and antivirus. Among those technologies offered to help with data protection, data masking is gaining attention. IT market research firm Gartner (IT) recently put together one of its Magic Quadrant reports on the state of the data masking market. Here are the details.

But first some background. What is data masking? If you are new to the technology here’s a good place to get started with basic definitions.  And here’s Gartner’s definition:

“…a technology aimed at preventing the abuse of sensitive data by giving users fictitious (yet realistic) data instead of real sensitive data. It aims to deter the misuse of data at rest, typically in nonproduction databases (static data masking [SDM]), and data in transit, typically in production databases (dynamic data masking [DDM]).

“SDM for relational databases remains the most demanded technology, and, in this research, we highly value vendors’ ability to execute in the SDM space (that is, to demonstrate maturity, quality and scalability of SDM technology, as well as the high revenue from and broad adoption of it). From a visionary’s viewpoint, we highly value vendors’ ability to offer DDM, the masking of the big data platform and suites with multiple data security technologies.”

Here’s how Gartner has segmented the market in its Magic Quadrant analysis report, issued in December 2014.

Leaders:

Challengers:

Niche Players:

Visionaries:

Managed service providers looking to differentiate their security practices in the year ahead might consider  adding data masking, especially if they serve customers with compliance requirements.