Informatica Extends Reach into Security Intelligence

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Lost in all the recent hubbub surrounding a decision to take Informatica private has been a push by the company to significantly expand its role in the realm of information security.

At the RSA 2015 conference this week, Informatica will showcase its new Secure@Source offering, which enables organizations to leverage the company’s middleware to identify the relationships among different sets of data.

Amit Walia, senior vice president and general manager at Informatica, says Secure@Source is the first piece of security intelligence software that actually operates at the data level. As such, it can identify not only where a particular piece of data is located, but also the relative importance of that data to the business. Armed with that information, Walia says that IT will be better able to apply granular sets of policies to particular sets of data.

As digital criminals become more sophisticated, they are moving well past simply trying to hack into systems to see what they can find. Instead, they are going after specific types of intellectual property. The problem that most IT organizations face is that they’re never really sure where the critical data associated with the organization’s most important intellectual properties might actually reside at any given moment.

While IT security vendors have been trying to solve that problem in a variety of ways, Walia says that at its core, data security is really a data management problem. The degree to which IT organizations will take responsibility for securing data remains to be seen. But if IT is given the responsibility for being the steward of enterprise data in the first place, then by extension, it will be held accountable for how that data is both accessed and ultimately secured.