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

By Anja Glauch

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 the customer, and total cost of ownership 50 to 70 percent below Elastic Platinum.

Berlin, Germany, 10 September 2026. Ten years ago this month, someone paid for Search Guard for the first time. Since that invoice, 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

"When someone first paid us in 2016, securing Elasticsearch properly meant paying for a tier you did not need, or building it yourself and hoping. Closing that gap is still why people find us."

Jochen Kressin, CEO, floragunn GmbH

To mark the anniversary, Search Guard has published a ten-question quiz, one question for each year from 2016 to 2025, alongside a timeline of the decade. It takes about ninety seconds and needs no sign-up. Everyone who plays can have the team cookbook, a collection of recipes gathered from Search Guard offsites over ten years, and a perfect score enters a draw for a 110 euro LEGO gift card.

Learn more: /

Ten years of Search Guard: /10-years/

On-demand webinar library: /webinars/

About Search Guard

Search Guard is the Elasticsearch security suite built by floragunn GmbH in Berlin. The work began in 2013 as an Elasticsearch security plugin, the first licence was sold in September 2016, and the product is now trusted by enterprises, SaaS providers, and government agencies worldwide to protect mission-critical search infrastructure. Search Guard provides encryption at rest, fine-grained access control, audit logging, and real-time alerting, delivered through a transparent licensing model that is independent of node count and data volume.

Press Contact

Anja Glauch

Chief Marketing Officer, Search Guard Email: aglauch@search-guard.com Website: Address: floragunn GmbH, Tempelhofer Ufer 16, 10963 Berlin, Germany

Published: 2026-09-22

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