As incumbent data security solutions shift their focus to cloud-only models, many organizations face a critical gap in protecting local and hybrid infrastructure. This trend leaves you searching for a robust alternative that understands the complexities of on-premise data security, unlike many cloud-first solutions. DataStealth provides a true hybrid-first platform, delivering agentless, data-centric protection to neutralize risk across your entire estate, from mainframes to multi-cloud, without demanding disruptive changes to your systems.
This guide is written for organizations that cannot rely on cloud-only security vendors and need a true on-prem or hybrid-first data protection platform.
DataStealth is best suited for:
A vendor's pivot to a cloud-only model presents a direct challenge to your organization's security posture if you rely on on-premise or hybrid systems. This strategic shift requires you to re-evaluate your data protection strategy to ensure your most critical local data assets are not left exposed. Without a dedicated on-premise solution from your existing vendor, you must find a replacement that can effectively secure the data residing within your own data centers.
When a vendor announces a strategic shift away from self-hosted solutions, it creates a need for customers to begin planning. While timelines can vary, this industry trend requires IT and security leaders to proactively find, vet, and implement a new platform. The goal is to execute a strategic migration project that avoids any lapse in security coverage for on-premise file servers, databases, and applications.
Your organization likely maintains on-premise systems for valid business and regulatory reasons. These may include strict data residency laws, performance requirements for latency-sensitive applications, or deep investments in legacy infrastructure. While considering alternatives, you might evaluate Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools from vendors like Forcepoint DLP, Trellix DLP, or Symantec DLP. However, many of these solutions still depend on disruptive agents or focus on preventing data egress rather than neutralizing the data itself.
Relying on a vendor with a cloud-first focus creates potential blind spots for data residing within your own data centers. A platform architected primarily for SaaS applications and cloud storage is likely to lack the deep visibility and native integration capabilities needed to protect complex on-premise environments. This discrepancy can lead to inconsistent security policies and expose your organization to unnecessary risk.
You now face the challenge of replacing an established platform that has been integrated into your security operations. This process introduces the risk of a complex, costly, and disruptive migration. Your IT and security teams require a seamless transition to a new solution for their On‑Premise Deployment & Legacy Support , making a low-impact implementation path a critical evaluation criterion.
Cloud-first vendors typically lack:
This comparison contrasts legacy posture-based models with DataStealth's hybrid-first platform to clarify the critical capability differences for securing on-premise and hybrid environments. By examining the fundamental differences, you can better evaluate why a platform purpose-built for on-premise security is necessary for organizations that cannot leave their local data behind.
The core difference lies in the philosophical approach. Legacy tools focus on security posture — i.e., understanding who has access to what data. While valuable, this doesn't protect the data if an attacker bypasses controls. DataStealth operates on an "assume breach" model, using techniques like tokenization to make data unusable to unauthorized parties. This is achieved through an agentless architecture that offers no code changes, no APIs, and no agents , minimizing operational disruption.
DataStealth delivers agentless protection by operating at the network layer to inspect data in motion and apply security controls transparently, ensuring comprehensive protection without impacting your systems or applications. This approach secures data across your entire hybrid ecosystem without the overhead of traditional agent-based solutions.
DataStealth’s platform is deployed as a transparent proxy or via a network tap, placing it in the path of data traffic. By intercepting data at this layer, the platform gains complete visibility into data flows without requiring any software to be installed on endpoints or servers. This method is non-intrusive and preserves the stability and performance of your critical systems.
Once intercepted, the data is processed in real time. The platform uses deep content inspection to discover sensitive data patterns you define. As soon as this data is identified, pre-configured protection policies – like tokenization or masking – are applied instantly. The protected data is then forwarded to its original destination, all within microseconds, ensuring no discernible impact on application performance.
This entire process occurs at the network layer, eliminating the need to install agents, refactor application code, or modify legacy systems. This agentless architecture is a critical advantage for protecting sensitive environments like mainframes or specialized industrial control systems where installing third-party software is not feasible.
The network-based architecture enables you to apply a single, consistent set of data protection policies across your entire hybrid infrastructure. The same rule that protects PII from an on-premise application can be applied to data moving into a SaaS platform. This unified enforcement eliminates security gaps, allowing you to pair posture/runtime tools with in‑line data protection across clouds and on‑prem systems.
DataStealth supports all major deployment patterns:
DataStealth simplifies compliance with regulations such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR by leveraging advanced tokenization and masking to reduce the audit scope of your on-premises systems. By de-identifying data before it is stored or processed, you can remove systems from stringent regulatory requirements, reducing compliance costs and effort.
DataStealth’s format-preserving tokenization & data protection features replace sensitive data elements—such as Primary Account Numbers (PANs) or Protected Health Information (PHI)—with non-sensitive tokens. Because the tokenized data is not considered sensitive, any on-premise system that only handles tokens may be removed from your audit scope. As noted by Microsoft, " tokenization is a data security technique that can reduce the PCI audit scope ."
DataStealth protects data in non-production environments by applying static data masking to create realistic, de-identified datasets. Your development and testing environments are often a hidden source of compliance risk. This process allows your developers and QA teams to work with high-fidelity data that maintains referential integrity without ever exposing real sensitive information, satisfying key data minimization principles under GDPR.
DataStealth maintains auditable governance by providing a centralized policy engine with granular controls and logging every access request and protection action. Every request and action is logged, creating a complete audit trail. This makes it straightforward to demonstrate to auditors that you have robust, policy-driven governance in place to protect sensitive data.
DataStealth solves data residency challenges by tokenizing data within a specific geographic region before it is transferred to other services. This ensures that sensitive, regulated data never physically leaves its country of origin, while the business can still leverage global services using the non-sensitive tokens for processing and analysis.
DataStealth is a PCI Level 1 Service Provider and a Participating Principal Organization helping shape PCI standards.
DataStealth secures your most critical mainframe and legacy systems by applying data-centric protection without requiring disruptive changes. Mainframes remain the operational core for many enterprises, yet they are often a blind spot for cloud-first security vendors and some traditional on-premise tools.
Our platform provides a crucial layer of security that complements your existing mainframe access control and encryption tools. While access controls like Broadcom CA ACF2 manage permissions, data masking solutions like IBM InfoSphere Optim prepare test data, and products like Thales CipherTrust Transparent Encryption handle data at rest, DataStealth protects your data in-motion with real-time tokenization. This neutralizes sensitive information before it lands in your mainframe databases, ensuring that even if access controls fail, the data itself remains worthless.
DataStealth provides non-invasive mainframe support by protecting these environments without installing any agents or software on these sensitive systems. As explained in our agentless architecture, the platform operates at the network level, ensuring there is no impact on mainframe performance or stability while extending modern data protection to your most critical legacy assets.
The platform allows you to enforce a single, unified data protection policy across your entire hybrid environment. For mainframes, this means the data processed by legacy COBOL applications is protected with the same rules as data in your modern cloud services, eliminating governance gaps between old and new systems.
DataStealth future-proofs your legacy systems by acting as a security gateway, ensuring that sensitive data leaving the mainframe remains secure throughout its entire lifecycle. As organizations integrate mainframes with modern applications, this protection becomes essential. The Open Mainframe Project notes that " mainframes remain mission‑critical...reinforcing demand for solutions that protect mainframe data without massive app rewrites ."
DataStealth protects:
“Effortless Data Protection with Robust Support”
“I have been using DataStealth for over five years and appreciate the ease of the environment setup, especially as we collaborated closely with the DataStealth team to determine the size and scope of the project. The team’s involvement in configurations and product setup was seamless and efficient. I find the support team consistently available and ready to assist, which contributed to a positive experience. DataStealth prominently solves problems like tokenization, inline database and application masking, test data management, and PCI compliance, benefiting my organization significantly. Once configured, DataStealth operates autonomously with minimal input required, except for patching and vulnerability management, which streamlines my workflow tremendously. Moreover, I value that it is a single product offering multiple use cases and solutions that cater to diverse needs within our operations.” (G2 Reviews)
“Great Technology and Service Provider”
“What I liked best was their solid suite of products that not only protected our systems from risk but also helped us stay compliant with a range of standards and regulations. On top of that, their team quickly became trusted partners—sharp, reliable, and clearly invested in our success.” (G2 Reviews)
DataStealth offers a low-disruption migration path for customers moving from legacy on-premise solutions, focused on rapid deployment and immediate risk reduction.
DataStealth's core technology is designed to accelerate your time-to-value and empower your team to quickly and independently secure your on-premises data.
Securing your future in a hybrid world requires a forward-thinking, data-centric platform that protects your on-premise infrastructure long after cloud-only vendors have moved on. For organizations with vital on-premise and hybrid systems, DataStealth provides the essential continuity, deep visibility, and robust protection needed to thrive in the face of evolving threats. By adopting an "assume breach" philosophy and protecting the data itself, you can neutralize risk, streamline compliance, and secure your data wherever it lives.
DataStealth is a unified Data Security Platform that discovers, classifies, and protects sensitive data across on-premise, cloud, SaaS, and legacy systems—without agents, integrations, or code changes. Its patented platform applies tokenization, masking, encryption, and fragmentation to neutralize sensitive data, simplify compliance, and reduce breach impact.
