Support for Directory Services has been added to Varonis’ DatAdvantage data governance software, to allow it to provide  Active Directory auditing and recommendations on unused groups and group membership.

It now allows organisations to view domains, organisational units (OUs), computers, groups, users and other domain objects in the DatAdvantage(R) GUI. Organisations can also track who made changes in Active Directory, model changes without affecting production environments, identify data owners, and quickly and accurately identify files that contain sensitive information.

"Organisations need visibility, intelligence and automation to secure and manage the data on their existing infrastructure investments," said Yaki Faitelson, CEO, president and co-founder of Varonis.

"Adding Directory Services to the platforms DatAdvantage supports (Windows, UNIX/Linux, SharePoint and Exchange) gives our customers the opportunity to leverage the Varonis Metadata Framework  technology to improve security for Active Directory."

The amount of unstructured and semi-structured data (files, spreadsheets, presentations, video, etc.) that organisations need to manage and protect is growing at 50 percent year over year.

Further, the number of data management elements--the folders, groups, and access control lists--is doubling every year. With dynamic, cross-functional teams accessing data sets in numerous locations on multiple platforms, it is difficult or impossible for IT administrators to determine who has access, needs access, does access, and "owns" the data. The manual approaches to data management and protection that worked ten years ago are both inefficient and unrealistic.

"We selected Varonis software because of their unique investigative features and functionality that enable our team to feel confident that the right people have access to the right data," said Bruce Jones, Global IT Security, Compliance, Data Privacy & Risk Manager at Kodak.

Varonis also added several new enhancements to Version 5.7 of the Data Governance Suite, including:
-- Reports Template Wizard -- provides organisations with more control over report content, including the ability to: add, edit and delete user defined templates; add or delete columns; edit sorting, grouping, and reordering, as well as the look of reports.
-- Flag Enhancements -- helps IT administrators to better track, report on and prioritise folders.
-- Ability to Tag and Annotate Files and Folders -- allows organizations to more effectively track, analyze and report on users, groups and data.
-- Simplified Reporting for Data Owners -- allows data owners to see changes to their folders and groups.
-- Managed Container Candidates Reports -- a built-in report to identify folders that need a data owner. This is the critical first step in aligning data with owners and stewards.
-- More User Types -- enables organizations to create roles with more granular permissions in DatAdvantage, including six different ways to view user types as well as configure and edit or commit users.

Varonis DatAdvantage for Directory Services and version 5.7 of the Varonis Data Governance Suite will be generally available on November 28, 2011.

www.varonis.com