“What our company provides is to control access to your data, keeping in mind the concept of zero-trust. This means, restricting and limiting access to databases only to the person and what they need”

Zero-trust security is an emerging solution in protecting sensitive data for companies of all sizes, from large-scale to small-scale. Businesses rely on their data storehouses not only to maintain client and customer data, but also to maintain company data insights that are key to any company’s growth. In this way, having a handle on the database is key for a company’s continued performance, except problems occur at the level of access control - who has access and when. This is where zero-trust security becomes a crucial aspect for companies to put into place, and Datasparc is leading this implementation across the data security sector.

Company databases store highly confidential information and security breaches occur at the level of who has been granted access to the database. In most cases, “Businesses are blindly trusting everyone, including their developers, and then there are breaches that could come within your organization. What our company provides is to control access to your data, keeping in mind the concept of zero-trust. This means, restricting and limiting access to databases only to the person in need and what they need,” says Manish Shah, CEO of Datasparc. The problem is too many people have access to a broad range of company data that is not needed for a single user’s purpose. Instead, Datasparc aims to create a tool of specificity where certain users are afforded access to specific pockets of data to fulfil a need. Put another way, Shah says, “Most of the companies, what they do when you go and ask your database administrator to give access to any database, they will create a username and password without asking much and they'll give you the full access which is not good, right? For example, if you are in the healthcare industry and if you need to work on the billing data and if someone gives you access to everything, you can see patients' healthcare data too.” Datasparc recognizes these overlaps in access and seeks to help its customers provision zero-trust data access. “Rather than providing unlimited access to the complete database, Datasparc’s product follows the zero-trust approach, with it's object access control policy on the database for the user and providing the ability to view only the dataset that they really need access to. Nothing more, nothing less,” points Shah.

The company’s flagship product, DBHawk, offers unprecedented data security, database management, data governance, and data analytics all in one comprehensive platform. DBHawk provides secure access and support for all of the major on-premises, cloud, SQL, and NoSQL databases. “It's a platform where we have multiple features such as data security, analytics, secure data access, all the features in a single platform. We have two kinds of offerings for our product. One is enterprise software designed for a larger corporation. We also have our SaaS solution, where we install and maintain the DBHawk instance on AWS or Azure or Google Cloud,” explains Shah.

In addition, DBHawk provides an enterprise-ready web-based platform with a wide range of features and capabilities for transforming how businesses manage data. It also comes with an ad-hoc reporting tool with powerful features for defining your data access policy and building insightful SQL charts and data dashboards. In fact, DBHawk is the first web-based query builder that provides an easy-to-use tool for generating complex SQL queries. With DBHawk, businesses can create queries without the need to write even a single line of code—the intuitive interface will help you add conditions and build your data query with just a few clicks. More than just supporting dynamic data masking based on the user’s predefined policy, DBHawk central policy management enables administrators to give access to specific data to end users.

Another capability that Datasparc provides through their DBHawk solution is the ability to authenticate users with the existing user management systems, logging and auditing each user’s SQL activities. “Our central solution keeps track of what the users are doing in a given environment,” says Shah. In this way, it not only becomes important for a company to find breaches in security if they do occur, but also to comply with many government regulations. Shah puts this idea into context by explaining how multinational financial company in France, using Datasparc’s zero-trust security solutions with their 1000 plus users, complies with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act with DBHawk. All of this is effective since movements in data are tracked and readily-available to report on.

At Datasparc, the team is dedicated to the needs of its customers, always striving towards excellence in work. “Our goal is to provide a solution where no matter what database you are working with, you should be able to use our product to query against multiple databases,” says Shah. The customer, in this way, always sees value from their investment in Datasparc since there is a continual process of reporting on multiple databases to create effective and timely solutions. Data automation is key to Datasparc’s vision of zero-trust security solutions, and this ultimately leads to simpler and more effective insights for companies to act on. In the future, Datasparc’s goal is to use AI to automate administrative processes even further. “We envision providing a solution where no matter what database they are working with, the client should be able to use our product to query against multiple databases, and bring those data into a single source,” concludes Shah.