The foundation of Mantra is the patent-pending Contextual Data Architecture. Unlike other solutions that are based on legacy firewall technologies, Mantra was designed expressly to meet the unique needs of high performance data auditing and protection. The Architecture is designed to provide a complete understanding – or “context” – for each data activity event. This context gives you complete insight into all activity happening inside your critical data assets.

 “Contextual awareness” is the ability to clearly understand the meaning and intent of commands issued to the database or file server. Other solutions use simple approaches such as pattern and signature matching to search for phrases of interest.  But these technologies can result in false positives, and even fail to recognize a client statement or action. They’re simply not capable of acquiring a deep semantic understanding of data system activities.

Conversely, Tizor has built a system that captures the full context of data activity, and can exactly determine client commands and intent. The system captures in real time all key dimensions of data that describe a client/data server session, in the most precise and accurate manner.
                                     
This accuracy is achieved by evaluating the syntax of all client commands sent to the data server. A purpose-built linguistic parser evaluates all SQL commands, and can distinguish each command down to the last detail. This is crucial, because protocols such as SQL have hundreds of different commands that can vary by database. For file share monitoring, the same policy engine examines database interactions and file share activities. Then Mantra performs its analyses in real time. 

As a result, the system is able to comprehend, rather than simply recognize, client/data server interactions. For example, the system can easily understand SQL verbs, such as “select”, “insert”, and “drop”, without becoming confused when those same terms are used as nouns, as values in a SQL command, or as part of a complicated query. This ability is critical to reducing first level false positives.

With the contextual architecture, Mantra users can develop very intelligent business policies that provide deep insight into the most critical data activity.   Mantra uses this data “context” information to provide a rich set of reports and analysis tools that quickly and efficiently identify the most relevant activity taking place in your data sources.   With the full data “context”, Mantra also provides a more intelligent approach to protecting your data without creating the false positives that other solutions produce.