Hitachi TrueNorth Partners have a complete solution to answer organisations’ data governance requirements

The integration utilises Varonis DatAdvantage to gain visibility, intelligence and control over the information stored within enterprise-class Hitachi HNAS and HUS systems. This development means organisations can manage, analyse and protect big data effectively and efficiently. By adding this new integration to their portfolio, Hitachi TrueNorth Partners who resell the solution now have the perfect remedy to the adage ‘you can’t manage what you can’t monitor’, solving a pressing data governance dilemma.

David Gibson, VP for Varonis, explained, “Organisations need to not only control who can access their data but, critically, audit who is actually using that access if they’re to remain compliant with data governance requirements.. Another driver is the introduction of collaborative capabilities, with enabling secure private cloud access to those storage repositories. Equally, migrating data between storage facilities, and even devices, is another area where knowing what you need to manage is critical. Retention policies are extremely difficult to adhere to unless an organisation maintains control, visibility, and the ability to enforce these rules regardless of where data resides.”

John Woodall, VP of Engineering for solutions provider Integrated Archive Systems (IAS), said, “Our mutual IAS and Hitachi Data Systems customers are storing extremely valuable data in Hitachi equipment, and they are keen to protect it. In this age of increasing regulatory requirements, legal considerations and the continued growth of unstructured data, proper data protection requires total permissions visibility and a clear, searchable audit trail of all activity—fundamental building blocks that Varonis provides. The Varonis metadata framework collects this critical metadata to identify areas where critical data is over-exposed and permissions need to be tightened up, and then allows changes to be safely committed to both file system and Active Directory objects from a single interface.”

Chris Morales, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Security Practice at 451 Research, said, “With the massive amounts of data able to be served on modern NAS platforms, it is becoming exceedingly difficult and important to have awareness of data access, retention, and rights to ensure data is not compromised through unnecessary access.”

The Varonis Metadata Framework™ non-intrusively collects critical metadata, generates metadata where existing metadata is lacking (e.g. its file system filters and content inspection technologies), pre-processes it, normalises it, analyses it, stores it, and presents it to IT administrators in an interactive, dynamic interface. Once data owners are identified, they are empowered to make informed authorisation and permissions maintenance decisions through a web-based interface—that are then executed—with no IT overhead or manual backend processes.
The solution comprised of Hitachi Data Systems and Varonis offerings provides:
· Visibility
· Complete Audit Trail
· Recommendations and Modelling
· Data Classification
· Data Ownership Identification
· End-to-End Automated Data Migrations
· Collaboration and Synchronisation

Gibson concludes, “We are grateful and proud that Varonis is increasingly seen as the de facto standard for monitoring large data stores. The combination of the high-performance Hitachi NAS Platform and Hitachi Unified Storage with the powerful capabilities of DatAdvantage ensures that organisations can monitor, manage and protect their investments in unstructured data. Customers want an integrated solution to collect metadata, provide information governance, and extract maximum value from their data. We’ve worked closely with Hitachi Data Systems to make this a reality.”