Quest One Identity Manager Data Governance Edition

Quest Software, Inc. announced its One Identity Manager Data Governance Edition to help enterprises better control and secure their growing volumes of unstructured data.

With more than 102 million managed identities across 5,000 customers worldwide, the company has extended its Quest One solution suite to free IT from the burden of managing unstructured data, while empowering business-driven data governance. This approach puts the appropriate people in control of who has, and should have, access to data as well as the ways in which they access it.

Unstructured data, (documents, images, spreadsheets, presentations, PDFs, videos, and other content) continues to grow at an explosive rate, both in volume and complexity.

A new survey from Quest confirms that:

• 86% of organizations believe the security of unstructured data is important, deeming it a top to secondary priority.
• More than half of all respondents believe that 50 to 100% of their enterprise data is unstructured.
• Just 15% of respondents are confident they would be able to track data back to the appropriate owners.

All of this means that organizations are not only drowning in information, but also have no effective way  to determine what they possess, where it is stored, and who has access to it. The resulting risk of regulatory exposure and crippling security holes is compounded when employees place unstructured data onto ungoverned services, such as SharePoint, and cloud repositories, such as Dropbox.

The survey further indicates that 58% of respondents believe that the responsibility for approvals lies in the wrong hands, that is, not with the business manager responsible for the data. The responses imply that access generally is granted on a "can I grant access" strategy, rather than a "should I grant access" strategy. The results further underscore the need for better control of access to unstructured data.

Additionally, 68% of survey respondents say that once a request for data is submitted and approved, it takes more than half a business day before IT can manually fulfill the request. This poses a burden to IT departments that are already overworked, and not in a position to appropriately fulfill the request in the first place.

Quest One Data Governance Protects Business
One Identity Manager Data Governance Edition features capabilities that enable automated, scalable, secure, and management of unstructured data by the information owners who should govern this data, rather than the IT employee who happens to know how to grant access.

It is designed to:

• Enable the line of business managers to control who has access to the data and to protect their organization through the power to analyze, approve and fulfill access requests
• Provide decision makers with dashboards to view trends, understand historic and current data access activity, and see attestation status on a personalized level, with reports that can be used to prove compliance to auditors-all without the need to involve IT
• Govern data according to best-practice policies set forth by management, but also based on the information discovered by the solution to help answer such compliance-related questions as who should be the appropriate business owner of data in a certain share. This information is developed from the evaluation of trends and read/write access of key users.

Pricing and Availability:
Quest One Data Governance Edition is available, with North American pricing starting at $35 per managed person.

John Milburn, VP and GM, Identity and Access Management, Quest Software, said: "Access governance is a major push for organizations of all sizes, and data governance is perhaps the most difficult component of those initiatives. We’ve seen countless organizations doing the best they can with what they have, and coming up short with regard to governance of unstructured data. With Quest One Identity manager Data Governance Edition, we’ve moved data governance into an achievable, business-driven exercise. Now organizations of all sizes can confidently report that access to unstructured data is requested, approved, fulfilled, and audited within a unified solution that places the control and visibility in the hands of people who are closest to daily business decisions."

Bill Moore, senior business development manager, Tribridge, said: "CIOs tell us that they struggle with providing users with the proper access to applications and data, while maintaining effective controls to meet regulatory requirements and protect that data. The Quest One Identity manager Data Governance Edition helps organizations understand what unstructured data they have and who has access to it. It establishes a process to make sure each user has the access they need, but nothing more, and that the right people approve and fulfill the requests. It also helps line of business executives understand the impact of granting access and provides them with the certification necessary for compliance."

Rick Teague, principal information technology analyst, Kings County, said: "Access request fulfillment is one of the drudgeries of IT. It can typically take up to two business days for a help desk to manually track down approvals and provision access to unstructured data, not to mention the rework necessary if a person’s role or responsibilities changes. Quest Software can help me avoid that whole issue and focus my skills elsewhere, by automating the fulfillment process to make access management fast and repeatable, yet effective and secure."

Ranjeet Vidwans, VP, business development, Identropy, Inc., said: "Managing unstructured data is still a major problem and new approaches are necessary. The newly introduced Quest One Identity manager Data Governance Edition will allow our customers to have more visibility into their unstructured data, apply detailed data security policies, speed up the fulfillment process, and keep related manual tasks at a minimum. It’s a great addition to the Quest One Identity Solutions portfolio, and delivers the kind of innovation and business value that our customers have come to expect from both Quest and Identropy."

Gartner, June 26, 2012, Don’t Make the Mistake of Assuming Your Unstructured Data is Secure: "The unstructured data held in enterprise data stores has increased to a spectacular degree, in terms of both volume and complexity. Manual processes for identifying high-risk data are not practical. Most enterprises now hold so much unstructured data that they have no effective way of determining what they possess, where it is stored or who has access to it. This unstructured data, as well as the inability to manage or even understand it, presents serious and growing risks for enterprises, including regulatory and legal exposure."