Using Varonis: Involving Data Owners – Part II

February 13, 2013

(This is 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.)

If your doctor said “Your blood pressure is 120/95” would that mean anything to you?  Even if you could interpret that data as symptomatic of stage 1 high blood pressure, would it be actionable?  A helpful doctor would not only help you understand your vital stats, she’d also empower you to make informed decisions about your health.

Likewise, not only should we deliver targeted reports to data owners, we should ensure that the information is actionable and provokes intelligent, data-driven decisions.

The next step in the Operational Plan is to help owners make informed decisions about who should have access to their data, and make sure they’re decisions can be executed without bogging anyone down in paperwork. With DataPrivilege we can do exactly that.

Entitlement Reviews

One of the first actions data owners can take is to re-certify access to their data through an attestation, or entitlement review. At a high level, the owner will review the list of users who have access, and users who probably shouldn’t have access to their data, make any appropriate changes, and then commit those changes to file systems or directory services. What has typically been a very manual and time-intensive (for IT) task can be completely automated with DataPrivilege, the internal web-based interface into the Varonis Metadata Framework.

Once configured, DataPrivilege Entitlement Reviews offer automatic, web-based forms delivered on a regular basis that show data owners exactly who has access to their data, highlighting any users that DatAdvantage recommends for removal based on its automated analysis. These recommendations show owners those users who have likely moved on to other roles, left the company, or were added by mistake.  Varonis’ recommendation engine is like the doctor withextremely trustworthy advice on how to immediately improve your health.

These entitlement reviews can be set up for data sets—reviewing the users with access to a specific folder or share—and/or for security groups or mail-enabled distribution lists. This means an organization is able to effectively shift the burden for access reviews for all data to its rightful owner, as well as leverage the same system for application and other group reviews.

Authorization Workflow

While entitlement reviews are key to correcting and maintaining access controls, it’s also important to involve owners at the “point of sale,” when access is initially requested by a user. Traditionally, access control approval has often come from the manager of the requesting user, a group owner that may or may not be aware of what data that group grants access to, or IT rather than the actual Data Owner. This is a problem, since that’s not usually the person who has the best context to make good access control decisions.  To continue our metaphor—it’s like allowing the pharmacy decide which medicine we should take.

DataPrivilege changes this model by offering an authorization workflow that puts decisions into the hands of owners and their designated delegates. A big part of operationalizing DataPrivilege is transitioning this approval process from IT to the end users and owners themselves. It can mean significant operational resource gains for IT as well as a higher level of service and data protection.

Self-Service Portal

The last thing I want to mention about DataPrivilege is the Self-Service Portal, which allows Data Owners to get information and make decisions on-demand. The DataPrivilege portal lets owners see—at any time—information about their data, including permissions, log information and statistics.

We’ve found that many of our customers have seen impressive results once they deploy the portal to their users. If you give owners information about their assets and the ability to make decisions, they tend to use it. The Self-Service Portal is another way IT can shift the management burden to owners themselves.

Empowering owners to implement policy is a great first step, but Data Privilege also offers the ability to automate a lot of this work. The next step in the Varonis Operational Plan involves setting up and deploying automatic rules. Stay tuned!

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2013 Security Predictions

February 12, 2013

When looking ahead, the landscape of threat, policy, and security is likely to become even more dynamic with cyber-attacks on the rise throughout 2013. These attacks will be more prevalent than ever across a larger breath of individuals and organizations as hackers broaden their target markets.

With the inevitable increase of security threats, Hardware.com presents five security trends we expect to see over the coming year.

1. Web attacks will evolve.
More common and simpler attacks will become easier to address, and companies will concurrently face new variants of web-based attacks. While effective and well-known SQL injection attacks will remain one of the most popular and damaging methods that receive media attention, other less popular attacks like Cross-Site_Request_Forgery (CSRF) are likely to increase. Many websites are vulnerable to CSRF, yet it is rarely addressed or protected against. This attack controls a user’s function of a website or application when he or she is logged into the site. As fewer damaging attacks start to drop off, CSRF is likely to become more widespread.

2. Software Defined Networking (SDN) will usher new intelligent security solutions.
In 2013 SDN will foster the rise of virtual networking focusing on activation, configuration, and service—changing the ability to direct traffic flows along a designated path. Security capabilities will begin to be distributed intelligently at the service layer. As a result, the security industry will leverage and extend the SDN approach by taking advantage of the control and data plane separation to provide for more agile and effective security. This level of security will intelligently monitor and respond to cloud and mobile network threats on a commensurate scale.

3. Cloud adoption will drive new security investments.
More organizations will adopt hybrid cloud models. They will also start looking for ways to provide secure remote access and extend BYOD & BYOS capabilities to their employees. We’ll likely see more mobile and web application security as a cloud-based service, as well as “information gateways” that add encryption and DLP from the enterprise to the cloud.

4. Mobile malware will increase and focus on profit.
Mobile threats continue to grow rapidly and increase in complexity. Juniper’s Mobile Threat Center reported a 350% increase in malicious and invasive applications targeting mostly Android users over a 12-month period, ending in October 2012. In particular, there will likely be a focus on exploiting financially-related transactions and applications. With mobile banking and NFC payment systems becoming mainstream, they will be an increasingly valuable target for attackers.

5. Expect an upsurge of large-scale web attacks.
The industry can expect to see a significant uptick in public breaches. On average, each breach is likely to be higher in financial consequences than the previous year’s breaches. It could even be possible that there will be an attack as big if not bigger than the epic Sony hacks of 2011. According to the Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report, “Web applications…were associated with over a third of total data loss” in 2012, and this trend is likely to continue—if not get worse. Even more alarming, large organizations with mature security practices are more likely to be the target of web-based threats.

Thanks to hardware.com

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SaaS Adoption Accelerates, Goes Global in the Enterprise

November 2, 2012

In working with manufacturers and financial services firms over the last year, one point is becoming very clear: SaaS is gaining trust as a solid alternative for global deployments across the enterprise. And this trend has been accelerating in the last six months. One case in point is a 4,000 seat SaaS CRM deployment going live in Australia, Europe, and the U.S. by December of this year.

What’s noteworthy about this shift is that just eighteen months ago an Australian-based manufacturer was only considering SaaS for on-premises enhancement of their CRM system. What changed? The European and U.S. distribution and sales offices were on nearly 40 different CRM, quoting, proposal and pricing systems. It was nearly impossible to track global opportunities.

Meanwhile business was booming in Australia and there were up-sell and cross-sell opportunities being missed in the U.S. and European-based headquarters of their prospects. The manufacturer chose to move to a global SaaS CRM solution quickly. Uniting all three divisions with a global sales strategy forced the consolidation of 40 different quoting, pricing and CRM systems in the U.S. alone. What they lost in complexity they are looking to pick up in global customer sales.

Measuring Where SaaS Is Cannibalizing On-Premise Enterprise Applications

Gartner’s Market Trends: SaaS’s Varied Levels of Cannibalization to On-Premises Applications published: 29 October 2012 breaks out the percent of SaaS revenue for ten different enterprise application categories. The greener the color the greater the adoption. As was seen with the Australian manufacturer, CRM continues dominate this trend of SaaS cannibalizing on-premise enterprise applications.

Additional take-aways from this report include the following:

  • Perceived lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) continues to be the dominant reason enterprises are considering SaaS adoption, with 50% of respondents in 2012 mentioning this as the primary factor in their decision.
  • CRM is leading all other enterprise application areas in net new deployments according to the Gartner study, with the majority of on-premise replacements being in North America and Europe.
  • Gartner projects that by 2016 more than 50% of CRM software revenue will be delivered by SaaS. As of 2011, 35% of CRM software was delivered on the SaaS platform. Gartner expects to see SaaS-based CRM grow at three time the rate of on-premise applications.
  • 95% of Web analytics functions are delivered via the SaaS model whereas only 40% of sales use cloud today according to the findings of this study.
  • The highest adoption rates of SaaS-based applications include sales, customer service, social CRM and marketing automation.
  • SaaS-based ERP will continued to be a small percentage of the total market, attaining 10% cannibalization by 2012. Forrester has consistently said this is 13%, growing to 16% by 2015.
  • Office suites and digital content creation (DCC) will attain compound annual growth rates (CAGR) of 40.7% and a 32.2% respectively from 2011 through 2016. Gartner is making the assumption consumers and small businesses will continue be the major forces for Web-based office suites through 2013.
  • The four reasons why companies don’t choose SaaS include uncertainty if it is the right deployment option (36%), satisfaction with existing on-premise applications (30%), no further requirements (33%) and locked into their current solution with expensive contractual requirements (14%).

Bottom Line: Enterprises and their need to compete with greater accuracy and speed are driving the cannibalization of on-premise applications faster than many anticipated; enterprise software vendors need to step up and get in front of this if they are going to retain their greatest sources of revenue.

Source: Market Trends: SaaS’s Varied Levels of Cannibalization to On-Premises Applications Published: 29 October 2012 written by Chad Eschinger, Joanne M. Correia, Yanna Dharmasthira, Tom Eid, Chris Pang, Dan Sommer, Hai Hong Swinehart and Laurie F. Wurster

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