1 Introduction
HexaTier is an Israeli security startup headquartered in Bnei Brak, Israel with US offices in Boston, MA and Irvine, CA. Established in 2009 as GreenSQL, the company has its roots in the eponymous Open Source project, a pioneering database firewall solution. In fact, the company’s first product was a commercial reimplementation of the project. Over the years, the company’s flagship product has evolved into a unified database security platform combining classical database security features with data discovery, dynamic masking and activity monitoring for a variety of open source and commercial databases.
In 2016, GreenSQL has rebranded as HexaTier to highlight a major shift in their marketing strategy. Although, thanks to the solution’s deployment flexibility, the company has provided support for cloud databases for years, 2016 has marked the decision to focus entirely on providing database security and compliance in the cloud. In December 2016, the company was acquired by Huawei, a leading Chinese ICT solutions provider. Under new ownership, HexaTier is relaunching its solution for much larger markets than it has had access to earlier, so we expect it to significantly improve its market presence.
Despite the recent major changes and innovations in IT, databases remain the most widespread technology for storing and managing business-critical digital information. Manufacturing process parameters, sensitive financial transactions or confidential customer records - all this most valuable corporate data must be protected against compromises of their integrity and confidentiality without affecting their availability for business processes. The number of security risks databases are open to is also substantial, covering the information itself stored and processed in databases, underlying computing and network infrastructures, as well as applications accessing the data.
Multiple technologies have been developed to address these risks, as well as to provide threat detection, activity monitoring, privacy protection, compliance and other aspects of data protection. Combining them into a comprehensive, layered and integrated security architecture is not an easy task. Moving databases to the cloud complicates the issue even further, since organizations no longer have complete control over the database infrastructures and their underlying operating systems, while still retaining full responsibility for protecting their data. Many companies, especially small and medium businesses, simply have neither resources nor skills to design and deploy a complex suite of security products for protecting their databases from multiple threats across multiple environments.
HexaTier’s approach to this challenge is to deliver a unified, scalable, and agile solution, which can be quickly deployed on-premises, in a cloud environment or on top of a Database-as-a-Service without any changes in existing infrastructures and then does not require much effort to maintain and operate. The company’s product can boast the highest degree of integration, delivering database threat protection, activity monitoring, sensitive data discovery and dynamic data masking in a single software package.
Unfortunately, HexaTier offers limited support for enterprise database management systems, focusing instead on products more popular outside of large enterprises, such as MySQL, Amazon Aurora or Microsoft Azure SQL. This makes the solution more suitable for small and medium businesses and companies looking for means to bring their databases to the cloud quickly and securely. Support for enterprise databases like Oracle is on the company’s roadmap, however.
