Introduction:

Forrester, a leading global research and advisory firm, recently published The Data Security Platforms Landscape, Q3 2026, in which Alibaba Cloud was included as a Notable Vendor. Alibaba Cloud believes the inclusion further validates the product completeness and technical foresight of Alibaba Cloud Data Security Center in converging data security with AI security.

Data security is moving from compliance-driven static governance into a new phase of AI-driven runtime governance. Enterprises must now contend not only with increasingly complex privacy regulations, data sovereignty requirements, and cross-border data transfer rules, but also with an entirely new class of data risk introduced by generative AI, copilots, and agentic AI. As AI agents emerge as a new form of identity that accesses, generates, and moves sensitive data, the traditional human-centric model of data control is being fundamentally reshaped.

Analyst Perspective

In the report, Forrester defines the data security platform (DSP) as: "A platform that delivers a holistic approach to securing data, understanding your data and its sensitivity, surfacing and generating insights about the data and its use, providing visibility of risks and threats to the data, and implementing data-centric security controls to enforce policies for data access, use, and lifecycle management."

Forrester further identifies the dominant trend in this market as “agentic AI risks drive an evoluation toward continuous assessment and expanded controls.” In line with this trend, Forrester designates regulatory compliance as the core use case for this market, and lists agentic AI guardrails, AI copilot use, AI training, database security, data provisioning and access, data sharing and collaboration, DLP/insider risk, and information governance as its eight extended use cases. This use-case map corresponds almost entirely to the current capability scope of Alibaba Cloud Data Security Center.

Product and Strategy

Alibaba Cloud believes that data security in the agentic era requires three fundamental shifts: from discovering assets to understanding intent; from periodic assessment to continuous runtime control; and from human-only identity to unified governance of both human and AI agent identities. Guided by this view, Alibaba Cloud has built its portfolio around Data Security Center (DSC). Upstream, it extends into Data Security for AI, delivering data protection across the full chain of large model training, RAG retrieval, and inference. Downstream, it covers the underlying data layer, including cloud-native databases, big data platforms, and object storage. Horizontally, it integrates with the agent-native security products released in 2026—Agent Security Center, Agent ID Guard, Agentic API Security, Agentic SOC, and AI DeepSign. Together, these form an end-to-end data security architecture spanning humans, agents, and data, closely aligned with the DSP evolution path that Forrester describes.

Alibaba Cloud’s Core Capabilities

1. Data asset insight across diverse data sources

Data Security Center provides unified data asset mapping across structured databases, unstructured object storage, big data platforms, and Lindorm vector databases. Built-in industry templates and custom rules enable automated sensitive data discovery, classification, and grading, while data asset maps, sensitive data distribution views, and risk trends supply business context—helping enterprises translate DSPM insight into data control policies that can actually be enforced.

2. Data-centric control across the full data lifecycle

Addressing the extended use cases that Forrester highlights—DLP/insider risk, data sharing and collaboration, and database security—DSC offers a complete set of controls, including data masking, dynamic masking, access permission tightening, UEBA-based detection of anomalous data behavior, and column-level encryption. Working in concert with Alibaba Cloud RAM, database and OSS access controls, and Key Management Service (KMS), it establishes a closed loop of discovery, assessment, control, auditing, and blocking/remediation.

3. Data Security for AI

For the three extended use cases that the agentic era introduces—AI training, AI copilot use, and agentic AI guardrails—DSC provides protection across the entire chain from pre-training to post-inference. Before training, it identifies, masks, and de-identifies sensitive data within the training corpus. During training and retrieval, it applies least-privilege access and content filtering to vector stores and RAG indexes. At inference time, Prompt DLP and compliance filtering of model outputs prevent sensitive information from leaking through AI channels, operationalizing the “runtime monitoring of AI agent data access and use” that Forrester emphasizes.

4. A compliance foundation across clouds, borders, and regulatory jurisdictions

Data Security Center includes built-in compliance templates for China’s Data Security Law, Personal Information Protection Law, and Measures for the Security Assessment of Outbound Data Transfers, as well as for GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS, enabling rapid generation of compliance reports and audit evidence chains. Alibaba Cloud itself holds leading certifications in China and internationally, including ISO 27001/27017/27018/27701, SOC 1/2/3, PCI-DSS, and C5, providing customers with a solid platform-level foundation of trust for running DSC across multiple regulatory jurisdictions—directly echoing Forrester’s view of compliance as the core DSP use case.

Conclusion

From DSPM to Data Security for AI, and from traditional data asset protection to the governance of AI data assets, Alibaba Cloud is elevating Data Security Center from a point product into data security infrastructure for the agentic era. Inclusion in Forrester’s The Data Security Platforms Landscape, Q3 2026 represents another recognition of Alibaba Cloud’s data security capabilities by a leading global research firm, and marks a new starting point for the Data Security Center’s continued investment in data security for the AI era.

Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. This report is part of a broader collection of Forrester resources, including interactive models, frameworks, tools, data, and access to analyst guidance, For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here (https://www.forrester.com/about-us/objectivity/) .