RSA opens up to interoperability

NEW YORK: Varonis Systems Inc., a provider of comprehensive data governance software, announced it has joined forces with RSA, the Security Division of EMC, to address the growing challenges organizations face as they manage and protect their growing volumes of unstructured and semi-structured data.

The interoperability between the Varonis IDU Data Classification Framework (DCF) and RSA’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Suite allows customers to identify sensitive data on their file systems, SharePoint Sites and NAS devices, find areas with excessive permissions and abnormal access activity, understand who can access, who is accessing, who shouldn’t have access, and who owns the data, and remediate risk faster than traditional data protection and classification products.

“RSA and Varonis share a vision of a secure information infrastructure,” said Yaki Faitelson, Chief Executive Officer, President and Co-founder for Varonis. “We are very pleased to join forces with RSA to solve business-critical information-governance challenges and significantly increase the productivity of IT staff and data owners by providing visibility, intelligence and automation with our integrated solutions. Together we are delivering a secure information eco-system that enables businesses to identify exposed critical information and take immediate action to reduce their risk.”

“Unstructured data in organizations is exploding, and IT departments are under tremendous pressure to control that valuable data and understand who has access to it, who is accessing it and, ultimately, who should have access to it,” said Tom Heiser, Chief Operating Officer, RSA, The Security Division of EMC. “Meeting that challenge has been difficult in today’s complex, ever-changing IT environments. The technical interoperability between the RSA DLP Suite and Varonis product suite are engineered to provide these organizations with automation and actionable intelligence that enable unstructured data to be secured and protected in a scalable and repeatable way without adding IT personnel or disturbing business processes.”

Unstructured and semi-structured data such as Word files and Excel spreadsheets makes up approximately 80 per cent of the average organization’s data and is growing quickly, as per Gartner. Current estimates place the increase at 50% year-over-year for most organizations. Understanding the sensitivity, usage, permissions and ownership of this data has become critical for IT administrators and data owners to comply with regulations and enforce corporate governance policies. Varonis and RSA software solutions are engineered to provide an enterprise-wide view of sensitive data, data permissions, data usage, and who the data’s owner is — to quickly identify the sensitive data that is least protected.

The press release adds, "Our solutions are designed to provide a framework that enables organizations to implement automated and repeatable processes that reduce exposure without disrupting business activity through automated recommendations and permissions modeling. The unified methodology immediately helps improve data security, decrease risk of data misuse, and ensure consistency in entitlement decision making. Data owners and IT gain immediate understanding of which files are sensitive based on company policies, who within the organization has access to those files, and who is utilizing that access. IT administrators can investigate permissions and usage, issue alerts when files are accessed by unauthorized users, and change access controls in real-time based on company policies."