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Solution for Finding Unused Data and Groups

For most organizations, 50% of data becomes 'stale' after 90 days. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to determine where that data resides, so it remains in expensive file systems and SharePoint storage, possibly exposed to risk due to excessive permissions and adding little to the organization's productivity. Like data, the security groups and access control lists grow stale—groups may be empty or unused on the file systems, or may be deleted from directory services and not removed from the access control lists, resulting in the "unresolved SID/orphan SID" issue.

Overview

The Challenge

In order to properly update directory services and permissions, it takes more than a search of active directory—it requires answers to difficult questions:

  • What data is not being used, or stale?
  • Which groups are and are not present on ACLs?
  • Which security groups are empty?
  • Where do ACLs contain a user SID or an unresolved/orphan SID?
  • Which are my inactive users?
  • Which groups contain disabled users?
  • Where are looped nested groups, or groups that directly or indirectly contain themselves?

Learn more > Read the Use Case: Identifying Stale Data and Groups

The Varonis Solution

The Varonis Data Governance Suite provides a comprehensive, automated solution to answer these questions, providing a framework to identify stale data, legacy users and groups in your directory services that are present in access control lists (ACLs) on file systems, inactive users, disabled users, unused and empty security groups. After initial data clean up and directory clean-up activities, Varonis provides an automated solution to efficiently maintain your data sets, permissions, and groups in your directory services in Active Directory, SharePoint, LDAP, and NIS.

Metadata Streams

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

Varonis Metadata Image

Why Varonis

Data protection is necessary to safeguard an organization's customers, employees, business partners, and investors. It is fundamental in securing an organization's intellectual property and competitive edge, and for maintaining the organizational trust required for it to properly function. Ongoing, scalable data protection and management require technology designed to handle an ever-increasing volume and complexity—a metadata framework.

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), pre-processes it, normalizes it, analyzes it, stores it, and presents it to IT administrators in an interactive, dynamic interface. Once data owners are identified, they are empowered to make informed authorization and permissions maintenance decisions through a configurable web-based interface—that are then executed—with no IT overhead or manual backend processes.

Resources

30-Day Trial

Our 30-Day Free Trial provides a full audit of your file system or your SharePoint environment. Audit permissions, auditing access, usage statistics, recommendations, impact analysis, and identification of business owners.

Within hours of installation

You can instantly conduct a permissions audit: File and folder access permissions and how those map to specific users and groups. You can even generate reports.

Within a day of installation

Varonis® DatAdvantage® will begin to show you which users are accessing the data, and how.

Within 3 weeks of installation

Varonis® DatAdvantage® will actually make highly reliable recommendations about how to limit access to files and folders to just those users who need it for their jobs.

Get the Varonis View. Sign up for the 30-Day Free Trial.

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