Varonis Review

Varonis is an data security company that promises to protect your most sensitive information from insider threats. Here’s our Varonis Systems review.

What is Varonis?

Varonis is an information security company that claims “insiders are the new malware”.

Today, companies are facing threats from inside their own company. “Insiders” may attempt to steal information from the company and sell it to the highest bidder, for example. Varonis promises to prevent data breaches by protecting your most sensitive information from insider threats.

Varonis has attracted some major clients. NASDAQ, NASA, MoMA, the US Army, ING, Toyota, and Boston University all use Varonis.

By implementing Varonis today, the company claims to protect you from the inside out. You can prevent things like ransomware from encrypting thousands of your files, or you can prevent employees from accessing information they don’t need. You can also check to see if there are already attackers inside your network doing damage, or how much sensitive content is available to your employees under your current data management structure.

Varonis Features

-Platform Compatibility: Varonis works with all major platforms and cloud services used by businesses, including Windows and NAS, Active Directory, UNIX/Linux, Exchange, SharePoint, and Office 365.

-Track Privileged Users: You have full visibility on domain and local admins and can identify accounts with unnecessary privileges.

-Monitor Every File Touch: Are employees opening files they’re not supposed to open? You can know when sensitive files, emails, and other data are opened, moved, modified, or deleted.

-AI-Powered Breach Detection: Varonis uses analytics software to learn each user’s normal habits. Then, it alerts you when an anomaly is detected.

-Secure Active Directory: Varonis will provide real-time alerts on privilege escalations, changes to GPOs, failed logon attempts, and other things you should pay attention to.

-Lock Down Sensitive Data: See where sensitive data is stored on your system and lock down that data before someone gets their hands on it.

-Limit Access to Certain Files: Varonis lets you lock down certain files on a need-to-know basis, and then pinpoint users that have access to files they don’t need to limit damage from insiders and attackers.

Ultimately, these features help Varonis tell you where your data is and who is accessing it. In many companies, sensitive files are stored in places where anyone can access them, and there’s little oversight on who is accessing the files or who is supposed to access the files. Varonis promises to change that and vastly enhance the information security of your company.

How Does Varonis Work?

When you sign up for Varonis, you get a flexible file management platform that can easily store all of your company data. As Varonis explains,

“The Varonis Metadata Framework has the elasticity to assimilate, synthesize and analyze metadata and platforms, and to automate execution of sophisticated governance, migration, and retention tasks for human generated big data, using regular computing infrastructure.”

The platform collects data in real-time without intruding on your business. Then, it continuously monitors this data to provide all of the features listed above.

Varonis Products

Varonis offers a number of different products suited for all different companies and organizations. Products include:

-Varonis DatAdvantage: Varonis claims this product is the leader in data protection and file analysis. You can use DatAdvantage to ensure only the right people have access to the right data at all times. You can also monitor the use of data and receive alerts when data is abused.

-Varonis IDU Classification Framework: Find and lockdown sensitive information and quickly discover where your sensitive information is exposed. You can also prioritize vulnerable data and lock down that data without interrupting business.

-Varonis DatAlert: DatAlert provides user behavior analytics in order to automatically detect suspicious and unwanted activity across disparate platforms. The service relies on analytics and real-time monitoring, helping you spot issues and prevent data breaches.

-Varonis DataPrivilege: DataPrivilege is a self-service product offered by Varonis. It gives business users the power to review and manage permissions without assistance from your IT team. You can also automatically enforce business rules.

-Varonis DatAnywhere: DatAnywhere lets you safely cloud-enable your existing file shares, syncing and sharing all or part of your file share data in minutes on your own servers without moving data or making changes to your infrastructure. Varonis calls this a “secure, private Dropbox alternative.”

-Varonis DatAnswers: DatAnswers is a security-minded enterprise search and discovery service that delivers relevant search results to the right people, helping to make your business more productive while limiting the exposure of sensitive data. In other words, employees won’t accidentally stumble across sensitive data while performing a search of your organization’s files (unless they have permission to access those sensitive files).

-Varonis Data Transport Engine: The Data Transport Engine promises to help your business automate its data retention policies. Using this service, you can create rules to find and migrate, archive, or delete files based on content, age, file type, access activity, and more.

All products come with a risk-free 30 day unlimited free trial. You also pay the same rate regardless of the amount of data you have. Varonis claims that most customers “see a return on their investment in 3 to 6 months, and for those who have prevented data breaches, that investment has been priceless.”

The company makes it easy to add products and services to your plan. Most of the products listed above run on the same Varonis Platform. The company claims that enabling a new product is “as easy as flipping a switch”. DatAnywhere is the only product that requires additional setup outside of the Varonis Platform.

About Varonis

Varonis was co-founded by Yaki Faitelson and Ohad Korkus. The pair got the idea for Varonis after working for a company in Angola, on the western coast of Africa. That client commissioned high-resolution photographs of the ocean floor at enormous expense – only to have those photographs disappear from the company’s servers one day.

The company struggled to find out who stole the files, why they did it, and how they pulled off the heist. Thus, Varonis was born to prevent problems like this from happening again.

Varonis is based in New York and employs between 500 and 1000 individuals, according to its LinkedIn profile. The company is headquartered at the following address:

1250 Broadway, 29th Floor
New York, NY 10001

You can get in touch with the company using the phone numbers and email forms featured here (contact information varies for customers all over the world).

Varonis offers a free risk assessment you can use to determine your company’s risk of experiencing file losses and other data problems in the future. You can start your free Varonis risk assessment here.