all about the data

Varonis Unveils Comprehensive, Actionable Data Governance Solution

A 2007 "Cool Vendor," Varonis helps organizations control and protect their corporate data; solution has been proven in more than 100 installations

NEW YORK - April 17, 2007 - Varonis Systems Inc. (http://www.varonis.com), the foremost innovator and provider of comprehensive, actionable data governance solutions, today introduced the latest version of DatAdvantage, software that gives organizations total visibility and control over their data, ensuring that only the right users have access to the right data at all times. As a result, enterprises can protect their most valuable corporate assets — their data.

Data governance is the framework of people, permissions and processes that are employed in proper data use. In DatAdvantage, Varonis has created technology that actualizes data governance by visualizing, auditing and controlling who has access to which data. With DatAdvantage, organizations can:

• View current user permissions to data — including permission types and inheritance
• Audit how the data is used — to get full visibility and an audit trail of access activity
• Control who gets access to the data — via highly accurate analytics that assess user behavior and recommend entitlement rights based on business need

With proper data governance, IT departments can reduce the likelihood of data misuse and, more importantly, ensure that permissions to key company information are warranted and based on an employee’s business need.

"Data governance is increasing in importance for all organizations, driven by compliance and transparency pressures, and the general need to regain control over their most critical corporate asset — information," said Ted Friedman, research vice president at Gartner Inc. "Enterprises must leverage and govern the full breadth of the content continuum, not only their structured assets."

The Data Growth Challenge

Enterprises face several challenges providing warranted controls and usage audits for unstructured data, such as documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Leading industry analyst firms have reported that:

• Yearly data growth rate exceeds 50 percent for many enterprises
• Unstructured data doubles every three months
• 80 percent of business is conducted on unstructured information
• 85 percent of all data stored is held in an unstructured format

As a result, the ballooning stockpile of unstructured data that organizations have under their care is nearly impossible to manage and control. The underlying issue is the lack of visibility into who has access to what data at any given time and, more importantly, who should have access. In many cases, permissions to folders default to broad groups like the "everyone" assignment — meaning that literally everyone in the organization has access to that given data set. Enterprises that have tried to limit access to only the right people have found that there is a lengthy and manual communications process between IT and data business owners when it comes to answering the question, "who should have access to this data?"

"Until now, there has been no realistic way to control permissions or track the usage of unstructured data, given the rate at which user access needs and data volumes change," said Yaki Faitelson, president, CEO and founder of Varonis. "We give enterprises the visibility and the intelligence to eradicate the problem with a fraction of the resources they devote to it today. Varonis delivers an immediate payback by significantly reducing the risk of data misuse."

Built on Sophisticated Modeling and Analytics

Based on patent-pending technologies, Varonis has created the Intelligent Data Usage (IDU) analytics platform. The IDU platform employs sophisticated statistical modeling and machine learning to analyze the access patterns of individuals. DatAdvantage leverages this intelligence to identify the business owners of the data and to continually determine who should have access based on business need with greater than 99 percent accuracy.

Named a Gartner 2007 "Cool Vendor in Data Management and Integration,"1 the Varonis solution has been proven in more than 100 installations with some of the world’s best known financials services, health care organizations, manufacturing and high-technology firms.

DatAdvantage: All About the Data

DatAdvantage determines what the current data use and access patterns are and gives IT operations personnel the recommendations and means to eliminate overly permissive or unwarranted access. Key features include:

Visualization of user/data relationships - By selecting a user, group or folder, administrators can see the permissions to the data set and how they were assigned or inherited.

Adaptive authorization computation - Based on analysis of the actual data use, DatAdvantage continuously monitors and automatically identifies data entitlements, showing exactly who should be removed from having access. Administrators can enact the Varonis recommendations in the live environment with a mouse click, or see the impact in a sand box prior to implementing.

Data Ownership Identification - DatAdvantage identifies the names of the likely business owners for the data set so that IT administrators can verify data entitlements quickly.

Granular Data Use Auditing - DatAdvantage shows exactly who accessed what data right down to the file name. Administrators can view comprehensive reports on the data access frequency and type (open, delete, modify, etc.), as well as data use (user activity, critical folder access, entitlement changes etc.) for any given time interval. These reports can be automatically delivered to data business owners, auditors and other responsible parties on a custom-defined schedule.

About Varonis

Varonis is the foremost innovator and solution provider of comprehensive, actionable data governance solutions. Named a 2007 "Cool Vendor in Data Management and Integration" by Gartner, the company has more than 200 installations worldwide. Based on patent-pending technology and a highly accurate analytics engine, Varonis’ solutions give organizations total visibility and control over their data, ensuring that only the right users have access to the right data at all times. Venture backed by Accel Partners, Evergreen Venture Partners and Pitango Venture Capital, the company has headquarters in New York, N.Y., with research and development offices in Hertzliya, Israel. More information can be found at http://www.varonis.com.