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Varonis CEO shares insights for the 2008 data governance market

Yaki Faitelson Outlines Predictions and Trends for Unstructured Data Management and Protection

NEW YORK - Jan. 8, 2008 - Varonis Systems Inc. (www.varonis.com), the leading innovator and provider of comprehensive, actionable data governance software, today announced key insights into the unstructured data market for 2008. Varonis CEO and Founder Yaki Faitelson shares the lessons he has learned while building a company to serve the data governance market and while experiencing dramatic market adoption of the company's solutions.

"The meteoric adoption of our software has propelled our solution from ‘important' to ‘required' infrastructure for every enterprise", said Faitelson. "It is a testament to the fact that all businesses, regardless of target market, have a fiduciary responsibility to control and monitor data use. Our technology helps enterprises assure their employees and clients that this is one responsibility that no longer goes unmet."

Faitelson notes that until now the technology for implementing true governance of file share data has not been available. In the last year and a half, Varonis Systems has introduced the only solution that makes data governance an operational reality, adding more than 150 customers and, most importantly, educating the marketplace that the status quo is no longer the only option. Looking to 2008, it is evident that businesses are beginning to budget and plan for data governance, making its implementation a mandate at the highest levels of the corporation. Listed below are five of the most prevalent trends Faitelson sees emerging:

  1. Unstructured Data Access Control as a Business Imperative - Data remains the heart of business and competitive advantage. While protecting that data is mandated by regulations in many cases, it also is imperative as a business enabler because lines of businesses cannot function with unprotected, at-risk data. This year, we expect to see more self-initiated projects for data entitlement reviews to inventory the access controls as they exist.
  2. Data Steward Identification - Data governance requires that data stewards, those who own the data from a business perspective, be identified and assigned responsibility for their data. Until recently, the process of identifying owners has been lengthy and error-prone, often times taking days or weeks of manual, labor-intensive auditing. As a result, it is often postponed. Since the task has now been reduced to mere mouse clicks through new technology, corporate offices are proactively tasking their compliance and IT teams with a timely compilation of data business owners and their constituent data sets.
  3. Data Use Auditing - It will no longer take a data breach and teams of experts to comb through cryptic file server log messages. Now that the "who," "what [data]" and "how" can be answered in a few seconds, businesses will begin proactively auditing and fixing access. Further, expect regulatory requirements to catch up with available technology and refine forensic analysis to explicitly include this level of detail.
  4. Automated Data Permission Revocation - "Permission creep," that is, overly permissive access to data, has long been accepted as the cost of opening up networked data and making traffic faster. IT personnel tend not to revoke permissions for fear of breaking legitimate access. But the process can now be automated, with software identifying and recommending revocations. As a result, permissions revocations will become a human resource mandate and part of employee redeployment and termination processes.
  5. Data Stewards Get Control - IT has long managed data and its access by users without any business context for either. The rightful custodians for the user-to-data mapping are the data stewards - the business owners of data. With applications to seamlessly transition ownership in existence, projects for migrating data stewardship responsibility to data owners is now viable. With 2008 being the year of operational efficiency and conservations, these migrations are likely to be accelerated in order to realize the cost savings in IT resources.

About Varonis

Varonis is the leading 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 380 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.

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Varonis, the Varonis logo, DatAdvantage and DataPrivilege are trademarks or registered trademarks of Varonis Systems in the United States and/or other countries. All other product and company names and marks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only.