Data access, governance and retention solutions specialist Varonis announced the launch of the Data Governance Suite 5.9, which incorporates a variety of features to help enable organizations to manage, protect and safely collaborate with unstructured data.
Included in the feature set is DatAlert, an intelligent monitoring and change auditing solution that leverages the metadata collected by the company’s Metadata Framework. DatAlert provides alerts on monitored unstructured data in real time, including access or deletion of sensitive data, and changes to permissions and configuration files.
With DatAlert, users can monitor sensitive configuration files on Windows and Unix and Linux servers, detect changes made outside of change control windows, provide alert on access to highly sensitive data as well as alerts on privilege escalations. Alert criteria and output are configurable so that the right people and systems can be notified about the right developments at the right times.
“DatAlert’s ability to detect critical events, notify the right people and provide the context needed to address potentially unauthorized access or changes can help CISOs make their risk management processes more efficient and effective,” Jon Oltsik, senior principal analyst with IT research firm Enterprise Strategy Group, said in a statement.
The platform also allows organizations to receive immediate notifications on files accessed, modified or deleted, group membership, group policy and other Active Directory changes, as well as permissions changes. The latest version adds compliance templates and updated predefined classification rules, Microsoft Server 2012 support, Windows 8 support for the DatAdvantage graphical user interface (GUI) and bulk operations for authorizers in DataPrivilege.
“Organizations of all sizes are seeing explosive growth in the volume of human-generated unstructured data sets, which are typically the most valuable and sensitive files a company has,” Yaki Faitelson, Varonis CEO, president and co-founder, said in a statement. “With the Metadata Framework, our customers are able to extract more value from these types of data, while at the same time reducing demands on IT by relying on Varonis’ platform to help them identify and better secure sensitive data. DatAlert is the latest addition to our platform, helping our customers get critical information about their data in real time.”
A July report from Varonis found more than 40 percent of organizations surveyed had either no or very limited capabilities to detect data breaches using some form of automation—either real-time alerting or daily or weekly reporting.
The survey results show that nearly one-quarter (24 percent) of the 248 security professionals surveyed had no automation technologies in place to detect breaches by monitoring for privilege escalations, suspicious data access, file access changes or unusual email event activity. Another 19 percent of respondents had a basic capability to detect some of these events using automation, and just 6 percent of respondents said they could monitor all these events in real-time.