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 are very good at it, they have raised more money than anyone else in data security posture management, and their own homepage claims 74 petabytes scanned in seven days. If you can't answer "where does our PII actually live?", start with a DSPM scanner. We don't sell one and we won't pretend otherwise.
DataShield picks up one step later. Datasets are tokenized at ingest; agents query tokenized data over MCP; detokenization is a privileged, audited operation. Every governed tool call is checked against the agent's authority at that moment, and every decision is sealed into a hash chain you can verify 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 that March's access records weren't edited. A hash chain answers with math. A retained report answers with a promise. Run the verifier.
- You need to pull an agent's authority mid-session and have the very next tool call fail. Not at token expiry. On 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, and that is 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 is their home turf. We have no scanner of record and we're not bidding for that work.
- You want discovery, classification, DLP and data detection and response 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" designation. 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 the enforcement mechanism 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, and keeps proof you can check yourself. Buy the map from them if you need a map. Put the enforcement and the evidence here.
Feature by feature against a DSPM platform
Competitor cells describe what Cyera's site and press releases say as of the date above. If we've mischaracterised something, email support@myorg.ai and we'll correct it, credited.
| What matters | DataShield | Cyera | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Audit evidence | SHA-256 hash chain with Ed25519-signed checkpoints that are themselves chained. Verification names the failure: tampering, insertion, deletion, or truncation. Public verifier. | Access Trail covers billions of access events with one-year retention and "verifiable audit reports". That is monitoring and lineage. We found no cryptographic tamper evidence. | ◆ |
| Agent authorization | Every governed tool call passes a scope ceiling, an authority tier, and a revocation re-check before dispatch. Revocation lands mid-session. | Agent Guardian discovers agents, defines permitted actions, flags purpose drift, and does inline execution monitoring that intercepts dangerous tool calls. Detection and interception, not an authorization decision with a signed record. | ◆ |
| Break-glass | Scoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents that auto-revokes and can't be quietly deleted from the log. | Not described 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 workflows. The mechanical question of how erasure interacts with retained access history isn't answered publicly. | ◆ |
| Tokenization and data handling | Deterministic, join-preserving, vault-reversible tokens applied at ingest, plus quasi-identifier generalization (dates to year, decade or age band; ZIPs to 3 or 4 digits; partial phones, SSNs and emails) with a measured cardinality-reduction score per column. Detokenization is privileged and logged. | Classification and labelling, with enforcement handed to the platform underneath. The Snowflake integration drives tag-based dynamic masking. No reversible tokenization found. | ◆ |
| Sensitive data discovery | We scan, profile and classify a live PostgreSQL source in place, with no rows leaving it. Columns get labelled against 129 field classes covering PII, PHI, financial data and secrets, and the catalog carries a business glossary, typed lineage and stewardship queues. That is PostgreSQL today, not your whole estate: SaaS apps, cloud stores and endpoints are not ours, and the other database providers are declared but not built yet. | The core product, and a strong one. Agentless scanning at petabyte scale, recognised as a leader in sensitive data discovery and classification in April 2026. | ◇ |
| DLP | Not a DLP product. We do not proxy your LLM traffic. We do gate every value that leaves a governed dataset for a prompt: a PII or PHI column with no configured treatment is redacted, and a PHI dataset refuses any AI endpoint that is not marked BAA or ZDR approved. That is a gate on our own data path, not an inline product. | Omni DLP, built on the Trail Security acquisition, plus SafeType and a managed service. | ◇ |
| MCP and agents | Native MCP endpoints on Auth, Ontology, and Lighthouse. MCP tool tokens with scope ceilings, and per-call metering attributed to the agent. | Agent Guardian covers MCP servers and local agents including Claude Code and Cursor. Broad coverage, observational posture. | ◈ |
| 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. | Cyera Identity, the Oasis Security platform bought for $1B in September 2026. Their third identity purchase in two years, after the embedded identity module and Otterize. | ◈ |
| Deployment | Self-hosted in your own cloud or data center, or on a dedicated single-tenant server we operate. Your keys. | SaaS-first and agentless by design. Listings on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud marketplaces, and resale through the AWS Security Hub extended plan. | ◆ |
| Maturity signals | Auth, Guardian and Lighthouse are live in production (Guardian and Lighthouse since April 2026). SOC 2 not yet certified, and we say so. | Founded 2021, roughly $2.3B raised, a $12B valuation in June 2026, FedRAMP High "In Process", and customers including 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 rather than 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 decision. Proving it wasn't edited is a cryptographic one. Ours is a hash chain with signed checkpoints, and the verifier tells you what went wrong, not just that something did. That's the property EU AI Act Article 12 and HIPAA §164.312(b) reviewers care about. Try it in your browser, no signup.
Authority that can change mid-flight
An analyst quits at 11am. Her agent is 20 minutes into a 40-minute job. With DataShield the next governed tool call is re-checked against current authority and fails closed. A monitoring layer can flag that call after the fact. It can't un-make it. How Auth does it.
It runs in your account
Scanners earn their speed by being agentless and central, which means your inventory lives with your vendor. DataShield ships self-hosted or dedicated single-tenant, with your keys and your detokenization policy. Crypto-shred erasure runs there too, so 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, was valued at $12 billion in June 2026, and bought Trail Security, Otterize, Ryft and Oasis Security to fill out the platform. They have FedRAMP High in process, logos like Paramount and Blue Cross Blue Shield, and a partner bench that runs from Microsoft Purview to Snowflake Access Governance. Their scanning really is fast, and for a team that has 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, and 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 execution has disappeared. We agree, and that's exactly why we think the answer has to be an authorization decision at dispatch with a signed record behind it, rather than an interception layer that watches tool calls and files a report. Gartner expects most unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 to be internal policy violations, not attacks. Watching a permitted-but-wrong call go past is not the same as refusing it, and a retained report is not 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 every vendor call, including ours.
Can you cryptographically prove an audit log entry wasn't deleted?
DataShield: yes. Each record commits to the one before it, checkpoints are signed and chained, and verification tells deletion apart from truncation and from tampering. Run it against a sample chain at /verify. Cyera: Access Trail promises visibility into billions of access events and audit reports retained for at least a year. We found no tamper-evidence mechanism described. Ask them to show one.
What happens to a revoked agent mid-session?
DataShield re-checks authority on every governed tool call, so revocation bites on the next call. Cyera's Agent Guardian monitors execution and can intercept calls it judges dangerous, and Cyera Identity brings time-bound access from Oasis. Ask the specific question: if you revoke an agent at 11:02, what happens to the call it makes at 11:03, and who wrote the record of that decision?
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, so the evidence stays verifiable after the subject is gone. Cyera has a Privacy module and automated remediation, and their strength is finding every copy of the record. How erasure lands on a year of retained access events isn't documented publicly. 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 discovers agents, maps what data they can reach, defines permitted actions, monitors execution 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, authority tier, revocation re-check, then the call, then a sealed audit record. One is watching. One is deciding. If you want both, that's a reasonable answer too.
If we run DataShield, do we still need a DSPM?
Probably, yes. We're not a discovery tool and we don't want to be sold as one. If you have thousands of unmapped data stores, a scanner will find things we never will. What we'd question is buying discovery twice and enforcement zero times. The usual split: they tell you where the sensitive data is, we govern what agents do with the slice of it that reaches them, and we keep the proof.
Does DataShield have SOC 2?
No, and we won't imply otherwise. Cyera is ahead of us here and has FedRAMP High in process on top. What we offer instead: Auth is live a public threat model and a verifier anyone can run, Guardian and Lighthouse have been in production since April 2026, and design-partner terms include source escrow so a small vendor isn't a single point of failure. 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 with 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, which is not the same as authorization. — Cyera press release, 2 Apr 2026
Other head-to-heads
DataShield vs BigID
Depth-first discovery versus enforcement you can prove.
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.
See both mechanisms run in your browser: break a live audit chain, revoke an agent mid-session, then decide what your DSPM should hand off to. Demo Center access is free with a work email.
Get free Demo Center accessYou've seen the proof
Ready for a number? Scope your deployment and we'll price it against your own economics.
Get your quote →