Varonis Identifies Unstructured and Semi-Structured Data

Varonis Systems Inc., provider of data governance software, announced Version 5.5 of DatAdvantage and DataPrivilege, a further evolution of the Varonis Meta-data Framework, which enables customers to identify sensitive unstructured and semi-structured data on their file systems, SharePoint Sites and NAS devices.

Varonis’ software helps customers find areas with excessive permissions and abnormal access activity, understand who can access, who is accessing, who shouldn’t have access, and who owns the data, and remediate risk faster than traditional data protection products.

With unstructured and semi-structured data such as documents, images, spreadsheets, presentations, videos, audio files and email accounting for more than 80 percent of all data, organizations already have enormous investments in time, resources and processes across IT operations, IT security, IT storage departments and data owners to manually manage and protect unstructured data. These efforts repeatedly fall short because of the rate the data grows – 50 percent annually, the increasing access control complexity, and ever-changing access control needs.

“Today, a single terabyte of data will often contain 50,000 folders, of which 2500, or 5%, are uniquely permissioned,” said Ohad Korkus, Executive Vice President of Engineering, CTO and Co-Founder. “Each of these 2500 folders represents an organizational decision – "who should have access to this data?" More containers mean more decisions, and more maintenance for IT and data owners. The only realistic path to manage and protect this data is to implement methodologies for securing and protecting data that utilize automation and actionable intelligence in a scalable and repeatable fashion, without requiring additional IT personnel or disturbing business processes.”

As digital collaboration continues to accelerate in every healthy organization, unstructured data proliferates over multiple platforms, including Windows, SharePoint and UNIX/LINUX servers. Organizations require an intuitive, unified view of these data repositories to efficiently and effectively manage and protect them. Varonis has extended its framework to not only provide visibility to the data permissions and usage on these platforms, automate intelligence about excessive permissions, and allow testing/simulation of changes to these permissions, but to now also include full execution for those permissions changes to reduce risk without disrupting critical collaboration.

Collaborative teams and the data they create are extremely dynamic; the information that organizations consider sensitive is dynamic, as well. To help manage this volatility, Varonis has made rapid enhancements to its Data Classification Framework, including support for dynamically updated ‘dictionaries,’ allowing Varonis to examine the contents of files for any items contained in them, and highlighting matches in DatAdvantage for easy examination. These dictionaries can be updated automatically to keep up with organizational changes in projects, employees, clients, etc.

Varonis has also enhanced the capabilities and interface of DataPrivilege to streamline entitlement review and approval activities for data owners, and expand the scope of what can be managed and protected.

Specific features within Version 5.5 include:

• Enhanced Commit Functionality, enabling DatAdvantage to commit permissions changes to SharePoint and UNIX/Linux monitored servers. LDAP, NIS, Local UNIX and SharePoint group memberships can be modified. Users and groups can be added or removed from SharePoint ACL’s, assigned permission levels, and permission levels can be edited. For the first time, a graphical user interface (GUI) is available to manage traditional UNIX ACL’s AND POSIX ACL’s on multiple UNIX/Linux platforms.
• SAMBA Support for UNIX – DatAdvantage supports monitoring UNIX SAMBA servers, allowing organizations running SAMBA file shares to benefit from Varonis functionality.
• Per-Server and Per-Domain Access Controls, allowing IT to restrict a DatAdvantage user’s view on the server and domain level to reflect their management purview. Administrators will only be able to examine access controls and activity on servers for which they are assigned custodianship.
• Dictionary Support for DatAdvantage Data Classification Framework (DCF), supporting dictionary-based matching and automatic updates to multiple dictionaries.
• Simplified Entitlement Review Forms in DataPrivilege – Helps business users more easily learn to perform their own entitlement reviews by showing only critical data information, such as users with access, their level of access, and recommended response.
• Support for all Permissions Masks – DataPrivilege now offers full automated management for any NTFS permissions mask in addition to the commonly used defaults of ‘modify,’ ‘read,’ and ‘full’ NTFS permissions masks.

DatAdvantage and DataPrivilege Versions 5.5 will be available on June 7, 2010. All customers currently under support will receive the new 5.5 features for free as part of their Varonis support package.