Varonis Systems has released a new version of DatAdvantage for Exchange to provide administrators increased visibility and control over their mailboxes and public folders.

"With traditional approaches, it was very difficult to understand access to mailboxes and public folders across all the Exchange servers, effectively audit email access and communication, and find owners for public folders and mailboxes," said Bernard Besohe, local mail and system administrator for the Publications Office of the European Union.

"With Varonis DatAdvantage for Exchange, we have significantly reduced our Exchange access and data management workload for tasks that we do many times every day. We now have a single console with a complete map to our ever-growing Exchange environment that has enabled our staff to identify and proactively manage and protect Exchange data."

Microsoft Exchange journaling and diagnostics only capture a limited amount of data. With DatAdvantage for Exchange, administrators have full visibility into activities and into: Who deleted a message or a folder; who changed permissions; who sent a message on behalf of someone else; who changed the content of an email and forwarded it as or on behalf of the original sender; who accessed an inbox, read emails and then marked them as unread.

"Even with massive investments in messaging protection such as e-discovery, backup, antivirus, anti-spam, etc, organisations still cannot perform the most basic management and protection tasks within Exchange," said Yaki Faitelson, chief executive officer, president and co-founder of Varonis.

"It is impossible to say with 100% confidence that email is secure without visibility into who has access to mailboxes and public folders and what users are doing with this access. The limited visibility and controls offered within Exchange combined with soaring use of email continues to create situations of extreme jeopardy for organisations. Over and over we see that business catastrophes start with or involve email."

Varonis Metadata Framework technology uses file system filtering to bypass the limitations of standard file system auditing capabilities and Exchange journaling and diagnostics mechanisms. It is able to collect and aggregate enormous amounts of metadata non-intrusively, normalize it, store it, analyse it, and present actionable information to both messaging staff and non-IT users.

To prevent unauthorized access to mailboxes and public folders, Exchange administrators need to see and understand activity patterns over the entire platform, understand ownership of the data, visualize access for all mailboxes and public folders across all the information stores, easily identify stale mailboxes and public folders, and optimize processes for consolidation and migration. DatAdvantage for Exchange automates tasks that administrators are already doing manually hundreds of times every day.