Varonis Customers Enjoy Peace of Mind about Their Data While the Company Rockets to a Fifth Year of Consecutive Growth

“With the amount of data we need to manage, it’s physically impossible to do it manually without a solution like DatAdvantage® and be 100 percent confident that it’s accurate. Varonis gives us peace of mind.”-James Herbert, HIT Entertainment

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Varonis Systems Inc., the leading provider of comprehensive data governance software, announced today it achieved its fifth consecutive year of record growth. In 2010, the company grew sales 63 percent year-over-year from 2009, increased its worldwide licensed installations to more than 3,500 and added 340 new customers, bringing the number of organizations and agencies that use Varonis to manage and protect their data to 940 globally.

“While our team is very pleased with the continued momentum and how rapidly our new products are being adopted by our install base and new customers, our focus remains on the underlying drivers of our growth – organizations throughout the world need to collaborate digitally without fear of their sensitive data being exposed,” said Ohad Korkus, executive vice president of engineering, chief technical officer and co-founder. “We continue to experience hyper-growth because our software is engineered to enable safe and efficient digital collaboration without disrupting existing business processes. Almost every organizational workflow is becoming digital, yielding massive gains in productivity. By automating data governance activities, we see the same boost in productivity while ensuring only the right people have access to the right data.”

Eighty percent of the world’s data is unstructured (documents, spreadsheets, presentations, emails, images, video, audio, etc.) and it’s growing by 50-plus percent every year according to Gartner. While digital collaboration introduces efficiencies, it also exponentially increases the risk of data exposure as cross-functional teams access more and more data sets. The complexities of collaboration and volumes of data simply overwhelm organizations that try to protect their data manually. By automating manual data governance processes, risk is reduced as are labor costs. The high-profile security breaches that have occurred in the past year have shown that companies must be proactive in automating management and protection of their data by systematically restricting access to sensitive data, and monitoring its use and potential abuse.

“Varonis has enabled us to remove the risks associated with data permission changes within our IT environment,” said Colin Lennox, technical services manager at Baillie Gifford. “Employees with responsibility for sensitive and critical data now have confidence that there are no security exposures. As an organization, we can prove to our regulators that our IT controls are stringent and that we are providing effective protection around our data."

Varonis customers have the ability to completely standardize unstructured and semi-structured data protection and management on their file systems, NAS, SharePoint sites and Exchange mailboxes with the Varonis® Metadata Framework™ technology that forms the foundation of Varonis software. Organizations can effectively and automatically manage data access control, audit, ownership, classification, entitlements and authorization processes on the platforms that host unstructured and semi-structured data. The Varonis® Metadata Framework™ enables organizations to expand digital collaboration boundaries safely while at the same time significantly increasing IT workforce productivity for daily data protection and management tasks.

“Varonis is set for a further period of growth in the coming year as more organizations recognize data access and usage monitoring, permissions management and revocation, identification of data at risk, and finding data owners and classifying data no longer need to be done manually,” said Yaki Faitelson, chief executive officer, president and co-founder of Varonis Systems. “The instinctive reaction of many to inappropriate data access is to try and lock down all data — that is not only impossible, it is unnecessary. What was previously impossible is now possible through the intelligent use of metadata and data governance automation.”

From mid-tier businesses to government agencies and global enterprises, Varonis customers immediately see where their critical data resides, who is accessing it, who owns it, who has access to it, who should and should not have access to it, and then take action through quick revocation of excessive access controls and simplified data management processes.

Leveraging Metadata Technology

Collecting, analyzing and presenting metadata - data about data (or information about information) - for decision making and automation is a monumental engineering task. A critical part of limiting and automating access is the ability to leverage metadata. When it comes to identifying sensitive data and protecting access to it, a number of types of metadata are relevant: user and group information, permissions information, access activity, and sensitive content indicators. A key benefit to leveraging metadata for preventing data loss is that it can be used to focus and accelerate the data classification process. In many instances, the ability to leverage metadata can speed up the process by up to 90 percent, providing a shortlist of where an organization’s most sensitive data is, where it is most at risk, who has access to it and who shouldn’t.

The Varonis Metadata Framework™ technology that forms the foundation of Varonis software, 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, normalizes, analyzes, stores, and presents the metadata to IT administrators in an interactive, dynamic interface – automating the process of finding areas with excessive permissions and abnormal access activity, understanding who can access, who is accessing, who shouldn't have access, and who owns the data, and enabling remediation of risk faster than traditional data protection products.

Watch the IDC Technology Spotlight on Varonis

2010 Results

• 940-customers – Varonis added over 340 new customers in 2010
• 3,500-plus licensed installations worldwide – Varonis added over 1,900 in 2010
• 63 percent year-over-year annual sales growth
• Release of Varonis® DatAdvantage® for Exchange aggregates user, permissions, data and access event information from mailboxes and public folders. Sophisticated analytics applied to the collected information show detailed data use and determine rightful access based on business need. Key functionalities include bi-directional visibility into mail store permissions, a complete audit trail of email activity, recommendations on removing excess permissions and modeling of changes, data ownership identification through analysis of user activity, the ability to effect changes to permissions and groups, and the ability to include other metadata and platforms (e.g. classification information via IDU Classification Framework®, SharePoint, Windows, UNIX, etc.).
• Release of Varonis® DatAdvantage® for AIX aggregates user, permissions, data and access event information from directories services (e.g. LDAP and NIS) and UNIX servers. Key functionalities include bi-directional visibility into file system permissions, including identification of world-writable directories and files, a complete audit trail of file events, recommendations on removing excess permissions and modeling of changes, data ownership identification through analysis of user activity, the ability to effect changes to permissions and groups, and the ability to include other metadata and platforms (e.g. classification information via IDU Classification Framework®, SharePoint, Windows, etc.). Sophisticated analytics applied to the collected information shows areas of excess access and simulated results of both group and permissions changes.

About Varonis Systems

Varonis is the leader in unstructured and semi-structured data governance for file systems, SharePoint and NAS devices, and Exchange servers. The company was named "Cool Vendor" in Risk Management and Compliance by Gartner, and voted one of the "Fast 50 Reader Favorites" on FastCompany.com. Varonis has over 3500 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 Data 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.

ZAG Communications for Varonis SystemsBeth Mayer, +1-206-264-8220
[email protected]
or
Eskenzi PR Ltd. for Varonis SystemsNeil Stinchcombe, +44.207.183.2833
[email protected]

Source: Varonis Systems