File sharing and the Cloud

Yaki Faitelson, Varonis CEO, President and co-founder, said, “We are seeing tremendous customer demand for DatAnywhere, which has arrived at an opportune time for organisations that are experiencing the explosion of digital collaboration and the employee-propelled demand for mobile access, colliding with the necessity to protect their critical data. This latest innovation from Varonis extends our portfolio of enterprise-tested solutions, and will certainly accelerate our growth as we approach the 2,000-customer milestone in our worldwide business.”

Brendan McPhillips, Director at solutions provider Asystec, said, “The advent of cloud computing, and the growing number of free consumer file-sharing software tools, has brought about a dramatic change in the way individuals and teams work together and share information. These developments have introduced a host of problems and are leaving organisations dangerously open to risk. We have done some research around corporate file sharing and found that IT’s knee-jerk reaction has been to simply add a clause to their internet usage policy prohibiting their users from utilising these tools. However, what they are seeing is a large number of employees are ignoring this and cannot resist the temptation to utilise online file sharing because they have such a simple experience for personal use.”

With Varonis® DatAnywhere, companies are now able to offer employees the cloud experience utilising their existing infrastructure. This includes file synchronisation with existing CIFS shares over HTTPS, mobile device access, adherence with existing Directory Services and CIFS permissions, synchronisation lists, multiple device profiles, extranet capability, and distributed scalability.

DatAnywhere helps organisations achieve a critically needed balance between productivity and security. Data protection research undertaken by Varonis has found that 86% of employees describe themselves as heavy users of mobile devices – and only 15% say they don’t look at work-related messages or content after hours. It’s clear that organisations need a secure way for employees to be productive while they’re on the go. Yet that same study showed that 80% of organisations say they do not allow their employees to use cloud-based file synchronisation services, while 70% would allow use of these services if they were as robust as internal tools. Fully one-fifth of companies have no measures in place whatsoever to prevent staff from accessing file synchronisation tools.

Terri McClure, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said, “Although enterprise file sync and mobile access is shaping up to be a very competitive market, Varonis’ background in data governance and protection solutions for enterprise collaboration gives them an edge. With Varonis DatAnywhere, organisations don’t have to modify their processes, infrastructure or permissions in order to give end users the functionalities they crave. Access controls stay the same, data classification continues to function, and data doesn’t need to be moved to a new server. Interestingly, internal users can collaborate with mobile users without changing a thing. It’s a really unique approach.”

Brendan McPhillips of Asystec added, “DatAnywhere provides us with an alternative to cloud-based file sharing solutions that is easy to use. It allows organisations to create a secure private cloud experience using our existing file-sharing infrastructure. The benefits mean we can keep our existing permissions all the while providing secure, enterprise-capable file synchronisation and mobile access.”