Managing directory services just got easier

Varonis Systems, the leading provider of comprehensive data governance software, represented in South Africa by partner Magix Security, has extended its Varonis DatAdvantage product to include support for directory services. This platform extension allows IT to quickly improve data security through Active Directory auditing and recommendations on unused groups and group membership.

Directory services are critical to enabling the digital collaboration organisations depend on to conduct business. Every user authenticates to Active Directory or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), and nearly every access control list (ACL), mailbox and SharePoint site, as well as many other mission-critical applications, refer to users and groups in these directories for authentication, access control and storage of critical attributes.

As critical as directory services are, changes and other activities are often difficult to audit and analyse. With this extended platform support, Varonis DatAdvantage for Directory Services allows organisations to conveniently view domains, organisational units (OUs), computers, groups, users and other domain objects in the Varonis DatAdvantage 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 Mike Steyn, product manager at Magix Security. “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% 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 10 years ago are both inefficient and unrealistic.

Varonis also added several important 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 organisations to more effectively track, analyse 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 organisations 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 is currently available.