Security and Data Governance with Varonis

As you know Data is the engine of Digital Transformation. It is the lifeblood of applications, the currency of business, the beating heart of digital life. Data is the driver of new technologies, solutions, and businesses. The source of important and actionable business insights. The ability to find new markets, discover opportunities for improvement, and make good business decisions. Data about who, when, how, where, and why products are used gives product engineers, designers, and manufacturers insights on how to improve and innovate. Data is key to understanding customers and their preferences and optimizing sales channel strategies to fit their needs at the moment. Data enables organizations to streamline their operations and improve their efficiency. And data equips decision-makers with the ability to predict trends to put the business in the best position to capitalize.

Challenge:

The sheer amount of data and its rapid growth is a massive challenge. The size of the digital universe is at least doubling every two years. That means more than a 50-fold growth of data in a little over a decade. Human- and machine-generated data together are growing 10x faster than traditional business data, and machine data alone is growing at 50x the rate of traditional business data. Not only is there much more data, but it’s also changing at more rapid and unpredictable rates. Moreover, to compound the complexity, data generated at each source has its own unique change rate. Traditional servers, mobile devices, and telemetry-generating devices like automobiles all produce data that changes at varying rates.

As data grows and changes, so do the costs of managing isn’t just storing, securing, and moving it from place to place but also the lost opportunity costs of not having data where and when you need it, of missed insights, of flawed analysis. And, there’s also the rising costs of data misuse, loss, and theft, resulting in lost business, shaming headlines, brand damage. Moving data to the cloud does not absolve your business of responsibility for it. Interestingly and wrongly, 69% of organizations believe that Data Protection, data privacy, and compliance are the responsibility of the Cloud Service Provider. But, in fact, most Cloud provider contracts say otherwise. The enterprise is responsible for its own data.

There is not only much more data, but there’s also much more data everywhere. Today, apps and data may be located anywhere in the world in private Clouds, public Clouds, managed Clouds, SaaS Clouds, locked in legacy apps and disparate databases with fragmentary ownership, trapped in data silos, lost amongst a myriad of often incompatible devices, systems, and processes. In addition, more and more data is being generated from emerging sources like edge computing and the Internet of Things (IoT). We are entering an age where data is produced by nearly everything cars, thermostats, and household appliances as well as servers, workstations, and mobile devices. The structured data includes typical business information from common software that is easy to manage, monitor et control. Basically, the unstructured data are more complex to manage (File Server, CIFS/NFS such as NAS, Office 365 Data, etc.).

The new expectation for data in today’s enterprise:

As the importance of data has grown to drive every aspect of our digital lives, so has the need for solutions that can do far more than ensure its availability. In this new reality where enterprise data is scattered across many different Clouds and systems, ensuring availability across the entire enterprise becomes both much more critical and much more challenging. So does getting visibility into all this data across all the nodes where it resides and the networks across which it moves… Organizations are struggling just to know where all their data is. It’s even more challenging to be certain that it’s recoverable in the event of an outage, attack, loss, or theft. That it’s available for the predictive analytics that helps them gain a competitive advantage and improve business performance. That it’s in compliance as regulations like GDPR went into effect anywhere across the globe. And that it’s always available for services and users. Security, Data protection, Data governance, Compliance approach are ultimately important for every enterprise.

Data Governance:

IT governance ensures that the organization’s IT investments support the business objectives, manage the risks, and meet compliance regulations. Examples of organization’s IT investments: physical and technical security, encryption, servers, software, computer and network devices, database schemas, and backups. Data governance refers to the management of data in order to improve business outcomes and fuel business growth. So far, with the exception of asset type, data governance very similar to IT governance. A company’s executive suite should be asking some of the following questions: Do you have the right data and is it of sufficient quality? Do you know where your sensitive data and Golden Data are? How do you ensure data security? Without data quality, your data projects and analytics will inevitably fall short.

Varonis Software:

Today, I introduce Varonis software. This solution allows to increase productivity, sustainably, reduces risk, and lowers your cost. The products automate time-consuming data management and protection tasks and extract valuable insights from your human-generated data (unstructured data).

Varonis reduces the risk in the following ways:

• Data mistakenly exposed is identified and locked down safely, including sensitive and regulated content,
• Sensitive data are identified with classification feature (based on Patterns and regular expressions),
• Analytics, Compliance (GDPR, PCI..) and audit,
• Access controls are much more restricted, employees have access to only what they need,
• Data owners with knowledge of their data assets are in control, the right people review data access and group memberships,

Example: 32 users with passwords that never expire.
• Every file and email (Microsoft Exchange and Office 365) touch is captured and analyzed,
• All use is monitored,
• Automatic baselines are created for every user, deviations are detected (abnormal behavior),
• Abuse is detected and real-time alerts are triggered,

Example: Abnormal behavior – 17 MB of data sent to Gmail with Backup service account. This account is identified as Domain Admin.
• Security: All actions are monitored (suspected Ransomware, Crypto tool utilization, Data leak, insider threats etc.)

Varonis’ cyber kill chain:

It is a powerful security solution at the heart of your information system. I will publish several blog posts on Varonis topic from now on.

Waiting, I have the opportunity to participate in a live session in French as official Speaker Varonis about Security, Data Protection & Governance as Varonis Elite member. SECURE IT DAY 2020 is an event organized by Monaco Digital – Avangarde and his sparkling partners in Monaco & France. A day of demonstrations and workshops to talk about Security, Availability, Data, Cloud and Compliance. The event will take place at: “Business Cloud Center ”- March 5, 2020. You can find more information about the event here (register).

Event – Get Ready for Secure IT Day 2020 Paris!!

Vanguard Summit 2019 – Vanguard Summit 2019 – NAS Backup Sneak peek!!

Vanguard Summit 2019 – New Universal License overview!

Veeam Multi-Cloud Strategy & Components – Blog Post!

Step by Step Guide Veeam Backup for Office365 v2 Installation – Step by Step Guide!

VeeamON 2019 Coverage – v10 is coming!

VeeamON Forum France – Interviewed by LeMagIT: LeMagIT

MUG – Microsoft User Group – First event in Monaco! Join us!.

 
 

Please follow and like us: