– David Gibson, director of strategy at Varonis (www.varonis.com) says:
The new one-terabyte Swiss Army Knife, one of the interesting new products unveiled at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, is a popular reminder that organizations need to take extra care when defending their corporate data.
If employees can walk out of a building with such dizzying volumes of data in their pockets, physical security staff would have to be extraordinarily lucky to detect a rogue employee looking to steal what for many organizations would represent an image of their entire sales and customer database.
With this fast USB drive-equipped Swiss Army Knife being capable of 150 MB/s data write speeds, you really getting are into ‘Mission Impossible’ territory when it comes to defending your data against such electronic heisting.
As we all know, however, many organizations must deal with the prospect of stale, excessive permissions, and the absence of an audit trail — who is doing what with their data and when — and comply with regulations that mandate that access controls are properly maintained, and use of data is monitored.
One of the problems with managing and protecting data on corporate IT systems is that around two-thirds of the information is typically stored in an unstructured format. This unstructured data is notoriously difficult to track, owing to the volume of data, the enormous number of files, the complexity of the hierarchies and the permissions structure, and the amount of access events that are generated each day.
The challenge facing IT security managers is that effective permissions analysis and auditing now require sophisticated automation. Manual authorization processes are simply too inefficient to keep up with the pace of change, and native audit functionality included with the unstructured platforms is resource intensive, difficult to store, and difficult to analyze.
USB drives are incredibly useful, and many companies are hesitant to lock them down altogether. But with the prospect of someone being able to transfer the many gigabytes of files onto a device they carry around in their pocket or purse – and which bears absolutely no resemblance to a portable hard drive – the chances of a rogue member of staff being detected with this data are close to zero without using automation to audit and analyze access activity.
Against this backdrop, the arrival of the one-terabyte Swiss Army Knife high-speed USB drive is really a wake-up call to any organization that stores large volumes of data on its IT systems, and does not have a comprehensive audit trail of activity on all their data.
With more than 4,500 installations worldwide, Varonis’ patented technology and highly accurate analytics engine provide organizations with total visibility and control over their data, ensuring that only the right users have access to the right data at all times, all use of data is monitored, and probable abuse is flagged.
