c24 Application Hosting Specialists

(This one entry in a series of posts about the Varonis Operational Plan – a clear path to data governance.  You can find the whole series here.)

Almost every organization is now data driven. With all the talk about data growth and big data analytics over the past couple of years, people have started to ask: “How do we maximize the value of our data? How can we make sure we’re deriving real business benefit?”

The keys to maximizing the value of our data are to gather the right intelligence about it, and then give the right people the ability to take action using the intelligence you’ve gathered.

Now that we know who our Data Owners are, it’s time to start getting them involved. Remember that it’s the owners—not IT—that have adequate context to make decisions about who should and shouldn’t have access to their assets.

The next step in operationalizing Varonis is to provide owners intelligence about their data assets.  DatAdvantage can deliver data-driven reports that shed light on what is happening with their data: who can access it, what they’re doing with it, which data is stale, etc. These reports greatly simplify and optimize reporting by delivering reports to all owners which contain information aboutonly the data they own.

An Example

Say you’ve spent a few weeks identifying and confirming business owners for all of the top-level folders on a large NAS (or two, or three…). Depending on the size of the company, this might be a few dozen or a few thousand people. One of the most common next steps is to provide permissions reports on all of these data sets to the relevant owners. So the HR owner gets a report on all of the users who have access to the HR folder, for instance. It’s the same with Finance, Marketing, R&D, etc. In the past, you would have to create and deliver a separate report for each owner, which depending on the complexity of your reporting process might be an onerous undertaking all by itself. DatAdvantage gives you a far better alternative.

In DatAdvantage, to accomplish the same thing, you’d only need to create a single report, and all owners would get permissions reports once a quarter (or however often you like). Create the report, include the proper filters and formatting, and then set up a data-driven subscription to be delivered on the first day of the first month of the quarter. That’s it you’re done.

Every quarter, every data owner is going to get that report in their inbox, and the report will contain information about only the data that they own—they won’t see anything that doesn’t belong to them. As you add and change owners over time, the subscription will continue to work without intervention. If my job role changes and suddenly I’m the owner of additional folders, my permissions report will show those as well. If I’m no longer an owner, my report won’t contain information about what I no longer own.

Permissions reporting is a great use case for data driven reports, and it’s not the only one. Reports that show actual access can be useful, too.  What if every data owner could see exactly who on their team was accessing data most? What about those people who weren’t accessing any? Or people from outside their team bumbling around?  Who creates content? Showing owners what data is stale or which folders are growing the fastest can help give them understanding of how their using resources. Providing owners intelligence about where their sensitive data is, where it’s exposed, and who has been accessing it lead to informed decisions about how they can reduce risk.

Once you’ve started putting intelligence into the hands of your owners, the next step is to give them the power to take action without bugging IT. We’ll cover that next.

Related articles

• Using Varonis: Which Data Needs Owners? (c24.co.uk)
• Using Varonis: Fixing the Biggest Problems (c24.co.uk)