Managing Directory Services Just Got Easier
Varonis Extends DatAdvantage® Platform Support to Directory Services
NEW YORK – August 29, 2011 – Varonis Systems Inc., the leading provider of comprehensive data governance software, today announced it has extended its Varonis® DatAdvantage® product to include support for Directory Services. This platform extension allows IT to quickly improve data security through Active Directory auditing and recommendations on unused groups and group membership.
Directory Services are critical to enabling the digital collaboration organizations depend on to conduct business. Every user authenticates to Active Directory or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), and nearly every access control list (ACL), mailbox and SharePoint site, as well as many other mission-critical applications, refer to users and groups in these directories for authentication, access control, and storage of critical attributes. As critical as directory services are, changes and other activities are often difficult to audit and analyze. With this extended platform support, Varonis® DatAdvantage® for Directory Services allows organizations to conveniently view domains, organizational units (OU’s), computers, groups, users and other domain objects in the Varonis® DatAdvantage® GUI. Organizations can also track who made changes in Active Directory, model changes without affecting production environments, identify data owners, and quickly and accurately identify files that contain sensitive information.
“Organizations need visibility, intelligence and automation to secure and manage the data on their existing infrastructure investments,” said Yaki Faitelson, CEO, president and co-founder of Varonis. “Adding Directory Services to the platforms DatAdvantage® supports (Windows, UNIX/Linux, SharePoint and Exchange) gives our customers the opportunity to leverage the Varonis® Metadata Framework™ technology to improve security for Active Directory.”
The amount of unstructured and semi-structured data (files, spreadsheets, presentations, video, etc.) that organizations need to manage and protect is growing at 50 percent year over year. Further, the number of data management elements—the folders, groups, and access control lists—is doubling every year. With dynamic, cross-functional teams accessing data sets in numerous locations on multiple platforms, it is difficult or impossible for IT administrators to determine who has access, needs access, does access, and “owns” the data. The manual approaches to data management and protection that worked ten years ago are both inefficient and unrealistic.
“We selected Varonis software because of their unique investigative features and functionality that enable our team to feel confident that the right people have access to the right data,” said Bruce Jones, Global IT Security, Compliance, Data Privacy & Risk Manager at Kodak.
Varonis also added several important enhancements to Version 5.7 of the Data Governance Suite, including:
- Reports Template Wizard – provides organizations with more control over report content, including the ability to: add, edit and delete user defined templates; add or delete columns; edit sorting, grouping, and reordering, as well as the look of reports.
- Flag Enhancements – helps IT administrators to better track, report on and prioritize folders.
- Ability to Tag and Annotate Files and Folders – allows organizations to more effectively track, analyze and report on users, groups and data.
- Simplified Reporting for Data Owners – allows data owners to see changes to their folders and groups.
- Managed Container Candidates Reports – a built-in report to identify folders that need a data owner. This is the critical first step in aligning data with owners and stewards.
- More User Types – enables organizations to create roles with more granular permissions in DatAdvantage®, including six different ways to view user types as well as configure and edit or commit users.
Varonis® DatAdvantage® for Directory Services and version 5.7 of the Varonis® Data Governance Suite will be generally available on November 28, 2011.
About the Varonis® Metadata Framework™
Four types of metadata are critical for data governance:
- User and Group Information – from Active Directory, LDAP, NIS, SharePoint, etc.
- Permissions Information – knowing who can access what data in which containers
- Access Activity – knowing which users do access what data, when and what they’ve done
- Sensitive Content Indicators – knowing which files contain items of sensitivity and importance, and where they reside
The Varonis Metadata Framework™ non-intrusively collects this critical metadata, generates metadata where existing metadata is lacking (e.g. its file system filters and content inspection technologies), preprocesses it, normalizes it, analyzes it, stores it, and presents it to IT administrators in an interactive, dynamic interface.
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About Varonis Systems
Varonis is the leader in unstructured and semi-structured data governance for file systems, SharePoint and NAS devices, and Exchange servers. Named a "Cool Vendor" in Risk Management and Compliance by Gartner and voted one of the "Fast 50 Reader Favorites" on FastCompany.com, Varonis has more than 4,500 installations worldwide. Based on patented 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. Varonis is headquartered in New York, with regional offices in Europe, Asia and Latin America, and research and development offices in Hertzliya, Israel.
Varonis, the Varonis logo, DatAdvantage®, DataPrivilege® and the IDU Classification Framework® are registered trademarks of Varonis® Systems in the United States and/or other countries and Metadata Framework™ is under a registration process 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.