Varonis Asks Who’s Accessing Data on Your AIX File System?

Varonis Extends DatAdvantage® Platform Support to AIX UNIX to Provide Complete File System Visibility Into Who Has Access to Data, Who’s Using Their Access, Who Owns the Data and What Data is Sensitive

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Varonis Systems Inc., the leading provider of comprehensive data governance software, today announced it has extended its DatAdvantage® for UNIX product to include support for AIX servers. This platform extension gives AIX system administrators access to the Varonis® Metadata Framework™ technology within DatAdvantage® providing organizations with the ability to perform automated data access and usage audits, fix and maintain access controls, identify sensitive data and find data owners.

Varonis® DatAdvantage® for UNIX allows customers to quickly identify excessive permissions and abnormal access activity by showing who has access to data, who is using their access, who shouldn’t have access, who owns the data and what data is sensitive on their file systems. Information about AIX servers will now be displayed within the same single user interface that also monitors information from Linux, Solaris and NFS-enabled NAS devices, offering the same trusted visibility, audit trails and recommendations that customers have come to expect from Varonis Data Governance solutions.

“Digital collaboration is now a business critical activity for organizations and as a result IT departments are drowning in a deluge of digital data,” said Ohad Korkus, Executive Vice President of Engineering, CTO and Co-Founder. “By extending Varonis’ support to AIX servers, we are offering organizations an automated solution that provides previously unavailable visibility and control over their AIX UNIX file system data.”

The AIX platform support extends Varonis’ existing UNIX features and benefits:

Visibility – DatAdvantage gives organizations a complete, bi-directional view into the permissions structure of unstructured and semi-structured UNIX file system infrastructure, displaying data accessible to any user or group, as well as users and groups with permissions to any folder. DatAdvantage users can commit permissions and user/group changes right through the DatAdvantage interface; both traditional UNIX style and POSIX ACLs are supported. User and group information from directory services is linked directly with file and folder access control data.
Complete Audit Trail – Provides a usable audit trail of every file touched on monitored servers, including detailed information on every file event in a normalized database that is searchable and sortable. Data collection is performed with minimal impact to the file server, without requiring native Windows or UNIX auditing.
Recommendations and Modeling – DatAdvantage for UNIX provides actionable intelligence on where excess file permissions and group memberships can be safely removed without affecting normal business processes. It also models permissions changes without affecting production environments, so changes can be simulated without affecting a production environment, including world-writable files and directories.
Data Ownership Identification – Givesstatistical analysis of user activity, effectively identifying business owners of data. Automated reports on data access and activity involve data owners in the data governance process, reducing the burden on IT.
Extensible Framework - Easily extends to accommodate additional metadata streams and additional platforms.

The updated version of DatAdvantage® for UNIX will be generally available on November 19, 2010. All customers currently under support will receive the new features for free as part of their Varonis support package.

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.

Additional Resources

www.varonis.com/products
Mastering the Information Explosion () by Ohad Korkus, Executive Vice President of Engineering, CTO and Co-Founder

About Varonis Systems

Varonis is the leader in unstructured and semi-structured data governance for file systems, SharePoint and NAS devices. Named a 2009 "Cool Vendor" in Risk Management and Compliance by Gartner, Voted one of the "Fast 50 Reader Favorites" on FastCompany.com. Varonis has more than 2000 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, N.Y., regional offices in Europe and Asia, with research and development offices in Hertzliya, Israel.

Varonis, the Varonis logo, DatAdvantage and DataPrivilege are registered trademarks of Varonis Systems in the United States and/or other countries and Data Classification Framework and Metadata Framework are 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.