Varonis

Data Access Control That Is Accurate, Automated and Scaleable

Your organization already has many resources focused on unstructured data governance: user directories, access control policies, and IT staff such as server, storage and security administrators, help desk personnel, etc. The challenge is that without technology to both monitor and automate access control, ensuring that data is only accessible by the right users is virtually impossible. Varonis DatAdvantage and DataPrivilege solutions help you successfully govern your unstructured data by leveraging your existing operational core investments.

As its core benefit, Varonis DatAdvantage and DataPrivilege software ensures that the right users have access to the data they need to conduct business. Overly permissive access, and the associated risks, are significantly reduced. The return on investment is enormous considering what breaches cost companies in customer loyalty, business continuity and brand. There are also very tangible operational cost savings to be realized by making daily IT tasks significantly more efficient.

The use cases below are examples of how Varonis DatAdvantage and DataPrivilege software can save you as much as 50% of the costs associated with each business critical activity. In each case, we reduce the task time from weeks of manual effort to a few mouse clicks. Our customers are simply astounded during evaluation when they see how much detail and control is at their fingertips. As you read these use cases, ask yourself how long it would take your organization to:

• Revoke Unwarranted Permissions
• Audit and Monitor Data Access
• Data Migration and Archiving

Revoke Unwarranted Permissions

An employee joins a new department or project team, and you get a work order to give the requisite data permissions to this user. That is the last you hear about this person until he or she moves to a new assignment, and a new work order for access comes your way. Naturally, in each case you assign the user to the correct directory groups for access. You have processed many such requests over the last year or two, but few have been to revoke permissions.

This is a very common scenario across organizations of all sizes. File sharing servers are initially deployed with strict controls for access. These controls become more lax over time, though, to accommodate change and business flow. The result is that the majority of your data is much too accessible by users to whom it is not business-relevant. Removing legacy or inadvertently assigned permissions is a highly manual, error prone, and very lengthy process that involves identifying and contacting data business owners one by one. Unless it is imposed by regulations, in many organizations this is a daunting and expensive project that is typically not undertaken.

Varonis DatAdvantage and DataPrivilege lets organizations clean up overly permissive environments and keep them that way. Accuracy and efficiency is ensured by:

• Automating the determination of who should have access (and who should not)
• Continuously updating user-to-data permissions to reflect business change
• Identifying the business owners of data so that revocation verification is expedited

Auditing and Monitoring Data Use

Data audits help organizations manage change, reduce risk, and ensure compliance by answering questions such as:

• What users are currently entitled to access which data?
• Who were the last people to access a critical folder, and how?
• Who deleted a key file?
• How did a user get access permission to a file?
• Which administrator changed settings to the file server, and when?

Regardless of how often audits are conducted, finding answers to data access questions such as these is a time consuming and challenging task for security and IT operations managers who must pore through forensic information.

On UNIX file servers, there's virtually no way to generate data access audit data. On Windows file servers, the information provided by tools such as the Windows Event Viewer is inadequate and introduces the following problems. First, generating additional audit data impacts server overhead and can therefore cause a business slow down. Second, a great deal of additional audit data is generated, bringing about the need for additional products to analyze all the data. Finally, even with the additional data, IT staff must still search, sort and analyze the data to make sense of it and get answers to the audit questions.

Without impacting space or performance on your file servers (and without requiring Windows auditing on Windows file servers), Varonis DatAdvantage and DataPrivilege answers your questions with just a few mouse clicks. We'll show you every file-touch, for each user and group on your network, by action (open, rename, delete, etc.), filename, username or folder name.

Data Migration and Archiving

Data center managers are challenged to ensure that disk storage is optimally used and, more importantly, that data management costs are kept under control. This is particularly challenging since even by the most conservative analyst estimates, unstructured data grows 50% annually.

Additionally, research shows that up to 30% of this data may be inactive or not accessed in any given 15 day period. This last metric means that data managers waste cycles on controlling access to and making available what is essentially stale data.

Identifying and moving this data to offline storage is key to cost effective storage management.

Varonis DatAdvantage and DataPrivilege facilitate the process of migrating data from file servers and NAS to offline storage by:

• Continuously monitoring and analyzing user access activity on the data
• Identifying data that has not been accessed within a given time window
• Providing a detailed audit of the access controls being enforced for that data
• Identifying the business owners of the data

With Varonis DatAdvantage and DataPrivilege, storage administrators can reduce the costs involved in a data migration by as much as 50%.

For more information on Varonis DatAdvantage and DataPrivilege Access Control solutions and a 30 day free trial of the software contact the NAS sales team on 0870 752 6250 or complete and submit your contact details on the form provided under Contact Us