Ten Years of Search Guard: Complete Elasticsearch Data Protection Without Volume-Based Licensing

Encryption at rest across indices, snapshots and translogs, encryption keys that stay with you, and total cost of ownership 50 to 70% below Elastic Platinum.

BERLIN, BERLIN, GERMANY, September 17, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Ten years after the first commercial release of Search Guard, the security requirements around Elasticsearch have changed considerably, and so has the cost of meeting them. Regulatory pressure has increased, encryption expectations now extend well beyond the index, and infrastructure has grown in ways that make per-node licensing painful. Search Guard, a product of floragunn GmbH in Berlin, marks its tenth year with a proposition that has held steady throughout: complete data protection for Elasticsearch, priced so that securing a cluster properly does not become the reason not to grow it.

Encryption That Covers the Whole Cluster

Encryption at Rest is frequently implemented at the index level and left there. Search Guard covers Lucene files, snapshots, and translogs. The translog in particular is a well-known gap: it holds recent operations in plain text on disk before they are committed to a segment, and an encryption strategy that stops at the index leaves that data exposed.

Encryption keys stay under customer control throughout. There is no dependency on an external key management service and no vendor-held escrow, which matters for organisations operating under data sovereignty requirements in the DACH region and across the EU.

Licensing That Does Not Scale With the Cluster

Search Guard licensing is not tied to node count or data volume. Additional nodes carry no charge, staging and test environments are free, and standby clusters are licensed at a reduced rate. Organisations pay for production systems only.

In practice this produces total cost of ownership reductions of 50 to 70 percent against comparable Elastic Platinum deployments, with the gap widening as clusters grow. The more relevant effect for most teams is predictability: capacity planning and licence planning stop being the same conversation.

Core Capabilities
– Complete Encryption at Rest across Lucene files, snapshots, and translogs
– Customer-controlled key management with no external dependency
– Fine-grained role-based access control with document-level and field-level permissions
– Authentication integrations including LDAP, Kerberos, OpenID Connect, and SAML
– Detailed audit logging for operational traceability and compliance reporting
– Multi-tenancy for isolated workloads on shared clusters
– Real-time alerting with routing to Slack, email, and webhooks
– A Decade in Production

“The teams who ran Search Guard in production when it was a much smaller project made the case for it far better than we ever did.”

Jochen Kressin, CEO, floragunn GmbH

To mark the anniversary, Search Guard has opened a short public quiz running through October, with a prize drawn at the end of the month.

Learn more: https://search-guard.com/

Ten-year quiz: https://search-guard.com/10-years/

On-demand webinar library: https://search-guard.com/webinars/

Anja Glauch
Search Guard – floragunn GmbH
email us here

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