Wednesday, 22 April 2009

Varonis: the jelly-to-the-peanut-butter of net file shares

This isn't my usual area, but I had such an interesting and thought-provoking meeting with Varonis's Johnnie Konstantis that I wanted to blog a few notes...

Varonis produces a management tool to help IT do "unstructured data governance." In other words, it helps people manage the random dumping grounds of opaque files sitting around on shared drives. Compliance and e-discovery are the watchwords here.

Varonis is very proud of its EMC partnership. EMC resells the product to its disk array customers. EMC is also a customer: with 40K users of 420 file servers storing almost a petabyte of data.

More notes:
  • It integrates with ActiveDirectory and ensures that file system permissions adhere to policy.
  • It offers a richer user interface for permissions than Windows itself.
  • You can navigate and drill into Windows server access logs, which is useful for e-discovery.
  • It also helps you ensure your super-users aren't snooping on sensitive data.
  • It helps you find the business owner of data, which is important for e-discovery.
  • It can flag potential permission revocations (e.g., where a user hasn't used that permission in a while, because the user has changed jobs)

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