Risk assessments can help close the security gaps

Organisations store important, often sensitive unstructured data across their file shares, intranets, and email. This data is growing exponentially, but as it does organisations are struggling to keep pace with appropriate access privileges, usage, and the associated business alignment and relevance. Without proper insight into where sensitive data lives and who has access to it within a file environment, organisations are at significant risk that either external or internal threats will have more serious impact.

Based on nearly a decade of expertise in unstructured data analysis and security, the Varonis Express Unstructured Data Risk Assessment can be used by enterprises to scope and prioritise remediation efforts that, if acted upon, will significantly reduce the threat of data loss, theft or misuse. The Express Assessment includes detail on areas such as:
Overly accessible folders containing important or regulated content
Overly accessible hierarchies and data structures
Folders with stale information
Users with too much access
Unused, enabled user accounts

Ken Spinner, Varonis Vice President of Global Field Engineering, said, “Since we launched the Varonis Unstructured Data Risk Assessment in November 2014, there has been strong interest from companies trying to contend with the vulnerability inherent in their rapidly growing volumes of unstructured data. These are the documents, email attachments, spreadsheets, presentations, media files, and other business data stored in file and email servers and NAS devices -- often including sensitive or confidential data assets. In many cases no one is aware that this information is widely accessible, often by everyone in the company. With the new Express version of the risk assessment, any organization can look at a portion of their most sensitive data assets and get a fast, accurate picture of how at risk they really are on the inside, where it counts.”

Working in concert with a company’s IT staff, Varonis engineers will collect and analyse metadata from key infrastructure components and return a detailed analysis to be reviewed with the staff. The analysis, titled The Varonis Express Unstructured Data Risk Assessment Report, will summarize key findings, rank identified weaknesses in order of risk, and provide a recommendation for remediation. A typical assessment takes about 30 days.