Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026
DataShield vs Cyera: who finds the data, and who proves what the agent did with it?
Cyera finds your sensitive data. They're very good at it. They've raised more money than anyone else in data security posture management. Their own homepage claims 74 petabytes scanned in seven days. Can't answer "where does our PII actually live?" Start with a DSPM scanner. We don't sell one. We won't say we do.
DataShield picks up one step later. Datasets get tokenized at ingest. Agents query tokenized data over MCP. Turning a token back is a privileged, audited step. Each checked tool call gets checked against the agent's access. Right at that moment. Each decision seals into a hash chain. You can verify it, without trusting us. Plenty of teams run both. Here is where the two really differ, including the rows Cyera wins.
The short version
Pick DataShield when
- Someone will one day ask you to prove March's access log wasn't edited. A hash chain answers with math. A kept report answers with a promise. Run the verifier.
- You need to pull an agent's access mid-session. The very next call should fail. Not at token expiry. Right at the next call. How Auth does it.
- The control plane has to sit inside your own account, with your keys. Cyera's speed comes from agentless SaaS scanning. That's a different trade.
- You'd rather read a price than book a call.
Pick Cyera when
- You don't yet know where your sensitive data lives. That's their home turf. We have no scanner of our own, and we're not chasing that work.
- You want finding, classification, DLP, and data detection, all from one vendor. Omni DLP and DataWatcher are shipping products with named customers.
- You're selling into federal. Cyera holds a FedRAMP High "In Process" mark. We hold nothing of the kind.
- Native hooks into Microsoft Purview, Sentinel, Entra, Copilot Studio, AWS Security Hub, and Snowflake Access Governance matter more to you than what enforces underneath.
Bottom line: Cyera tells you where the sensitive data is, and watches who touches it. DataShield decides whether the agent was allowed to touch it. It keeps proof you can check yourself. Buy the map from them, if you need a map. Get the enforcement and the evidence here.
Feature by feature against a DSPM platform
Competitor cells reflect Cyera's site and press releases. As of the date above. Spot a mistake? Email support@myorg.ai. We'll fix it, and credit you.
| What matters | DataShield | Cyera | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Audit evidence | A SHA-256 hash chain, with Ed25519-signed checkpoints. Those checkpoints chain too. Verification names the exact fault: tampering, insertion, deletion, or cut. Try the verifier. | Access Trail covers billions of access events. It offers one-year storage and "verifiable audit reports". That's watching and lineage. We found no cryptographic tamper proof. | ◆ |
| Agent authorization | Each checked tool call carries a scope ceiling. It carries an access tier, too. A revocation check runs before dispatch. Revocation lands mid-session. | Agent Guardian finds agents. It sets permitted actions, and flags purpose drift. It watches, inline, to catch risky calls. That's detection, not a signed authorization decision. | ◆ |
| Break-glass | Scoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents. It auto-revokes, and can't be quietly wiped from the log. | Not covered in their public materials. | ◆ |
| GDPR erasure | Crypto-shred of per-subject key material. Plus ISO 27560 consent receipts. The audit chain still verifies after erasure. | A Privacy module, plus automated remediation flows. How erasure hits retained access history isn't stated publicly. | ◆ |
| Tokenization and data handling | Tokens are fixed, join-safe, and vault-reversible, set at ingest. We also generalize quasi-identifiers. Dates become year, decade, or age band. ZIPs become 3 or 4 digits. Phones, SSNs, and emails get partial masking. Each field gets its own cardinality-reduction score. Turning a token back is privileged, and logged. | Classification and labelling, with enforcement handed to the platform underneath. Their Snowflake link drives tag-based dynamic masking. No reversible tokenization found. | ◆ |
| Sensitive data discovery | We scan, profile, and classify a live PostgreSQL source in place. No rows leave it. Columns get tagged against 129 field types: PII, PHI, financial data, secrets. The catalog carries a glossary, typed lineage, and stewardship queues. That's PostgreSQL today, not your whole estate. SaaS apps, cloud stores, and endpoints aren't ours yet. Other databases are planned, not built. | The core product, and a strong one. Agentless scanning at petabyte scale. Named a leader in sensitive data discovery and classification, April 2026. | ◇ |
| DLP | Not a DLP product. We don't proxy your LLM traffic. We do gate each value that leaves a checked dataset, for a prompt. A PII or PHI column with no set treatment gets redacted. A PHI dataset refuses any AI endpoint not marked BAA or ZDR approved. That's a gate on our own data path, not a standalone product. | Omni DLP, built on the Trail Security buy, plus SafeType and a managed service. | ◇ |
| MCP and agents | Native MCP endpoints on Auth, Ontology, and Lighthouse. MCP tool tokens carry scope ceilings. Per-call counts tie back to the agent. | Agent Guardian covers MCP servers and local agents, Claude Code and Cursor included. Broad coverage, watch-only stance. | ◈ |
| Identity for agents | Auth is the identity control plane. SAML, OIDC, passkeys, API keys. MCP tool tokens, JWKS rotation, and a per-subject connection vault, too. | Cyera Identity, the Oasis Security platform bought for $1B in September 2026. Their third ID buy in two years. It follows the built-in ID module, and Otterize. | ◈ |
| Deployment | Self-hosted, in your own cloud or data center. Or on a dedicated single-tenant server we run for you. Your keys. | SaaS-first and agentless, by design. Listed on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud marketplaces. Also resold through the AWS Security Hub extended plan. | ◆ |
| Maturity signals | Auth, Guardian and Lighthouse are live in production. Guardian and Lighthouse have run since April 2026. SOC 2 isn't certified yet, and we say so. | Founded 2021. Roughly $2.3B raised. A $12B valuation in June 2026. FedRAMP High "In Process." Customers include Paramount, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and DocuSign. | ◇ |
| Pricing | Published model, scoped instant quote, no sales wall. | Quote-only. No figures on their site. | ◆ |
◆ DataShield leads◇ Cyera leads◈ comparable
Cyera claims are drawn from cyera.com and Cyera's own press releases. Last checked 13 September 2026. We link them below, not just a paraphrase from memory.
Three things you get here that you won't get from a data posture platform
Proof, not retention
Keeping a log for a year is a storage call. Proving it wasn't edited is a math one. Ours is a hash chain with signed checkpoints. The verifier tells you what went wrong, not just that something did. That's the trait EU AI Act Article 12 and HIPAA §164.312(b) reviewers check for. Try it in your browser, no signup.
Access that can change mid-flight
An analyst quits at 11am. Her agent is 20 minutes into a 40-minute job. With DataShield, the next checked tool call gets re-checked against current access. It fails closed. A watch layer can flag that call after the fact. It can't undo it. How Auth does it.
It runs in your account
Scanners earn their speed by staying agentless and central. That means your inventory lives with your vendor. DataShield ships self-hosted, or on a dedicated single-tenant box. Your keys, your detokenization policy. Crypto-shred erasure runs there too. The subject goes away, and the chain still verifies. See the architecture, or the threat model.
Where Cyera is genuinely stronger
Let's be straight about the gap. Cyera has raised around $2.3 billion. They were valued at $12 billion in June 2026. They bought Trail Security, Otterize, Ryft, and Oasis Security. All to round out the platform. They have FedRAMP High in process. Logos like Paramount and Blue Cross Blue Shield. A partner bench running from Microsoft Purview to Snowflake Access Governance. Their scanning really is fast. For a team with no idea what sits in its S3 buckets, that first week is worth a lot. We have none of that. We're small. Our fleet products are young. We're not SOC 2 certified.
The push-back is about what a map is for. Cyera's CTO put it well in August. The gap between permission and action has disappeared. We agree. That's exactly why the answer has to be a decision at dispatch. It needs a signed record behind it. Not an interception layer that watches tool calls and files a report. Gartner expects most unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 to be internal policy slips. Not attacks. Watching a wrong-but-permitted call go past isn't the same as refusing it. A kept report isn't the same as evidence. Also, yes: we both shipped a product called Guardian. Ours is a host daemon that keeps the audit pipeline alive. Sorry about the collision.
Questions worth asking both of us
These are the questions we'd want answered if we were buying. Ask them on each vendor call, ours too.
Can you cryptographically prove an audit log entry wasn't deleted?
DataShield: yes, it can. Each record locks to the one before it. Checkpoints are signed and chained. Verification tells deletion apart from truncation and tampering. Run it against a sample chain at /verify. Cyera: Access Trail promises sight into billions of access events. Audit reports get kept for at least a year. We found no tamper-evidence method described. Ask them to show one.
What happens to a revoked agent mid-session?
DataShield re-checks access on each checked tool call. Revocation bites on the next call. Cyera's Agent Guardian watches what runs, and can stop calls it judges risky. Cyera Identity brings time-bound access from Oasis. Ask the exact question. Revoke an agent at 11:02. What happens to the call it makes at 11:03? Who wrote the record of that?
How does GDPR erasure interact with the audit trail?
DataShield crypto-shreds per-subject key material and issues an ISO 27560 consent receipt. Actor identities in the chain are HMAC-committed. The evidence stays verifiable after the subject is gone. Cyera has a Privacy module and automated remediation. Their strength is finding each copy of the record. How erasure lands on a year of stored access events isn't public. Ask whether erasing a subject breaks the log.
Isn't Agent Guardian the same thing DataShield sells?
It's the closest overlap on this page, so it deserves a real answer. Agent Guardian finds agents. It maps what data they can reach. It sets permitted actions. It watches, inline, and red-teams the result. It's built on top of Cyera's data map. DataShield doesn't discover anything. We sit in the dispatch path. Scope ceiling, access tier, revocation check. Then the call. Then a sealed audit record. One is watching. One is deciding. Want both? That's a reasonable answer too.
If we run DataShield, do we still need a DSPM?
Probably, yes. We're not a finder tool. We don't want to be sold as one, either. Thousands of unmapped data stores? A scanner will find things we never will. What we'd question is buying the finder twice, and the enforcer zero times. The usual split: they tell you where the sensitive data is. We govern what agents do with the slice that reaches them. We keep the proof.
Does DataShield have SOC 2?
No, and we won't say otherwise. Cyera leads us here. They also have FedRAMP High in process. What we offer instead: Auth runs live now. It ships with a public threat model, and a verifier anyone can run. Guardian and Lighthouse have run since April 2026. Design-partner terms include source escrow. One small vendor isn't a single point of failure, that way. Details on the security page.
- Cyera's current positioning: "Building the Trust Layer for the Agentic Era. Trust everything your AI can see and do." - cyera.com, 13 Sep 2026
- Agent Guardian launched with inline execution monitoring that intercepts dangerous tool calls, covering MCP servers and local agents. - Cyera press release, 3 Aug 2026
- Cyera completed the $1B acquisition of Oasis Security; the platform becomes Cyera Identity. - Cyera press release, 3 Sep 2026
- Access Trail gives visibility into billions of access events. It offers at least one year of retention, and generated audit reports. - Cyera press release, 12 Nov 2025
- Cyera raised $600M at a $12B valuation, after $400M at $9B in January 2026. - Cyera press release, 10 Jun 2026
- Cyera holds a FedRAMP High "In Process" designation. That's not the same as authorization. - Cyera press release, 2 Apr 2026
Other head-to-heads
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DSPMDataShield vs Securiti
A privacy command centre, and the layer that acts on it.
DSPMDataShield vs Sentra
Cloud data classification versus agent authority and evidence.
AllEvery comparison
One honest scorecard per vendor.
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