Data governance expands to the UNIX world

When I wrote about the DatAdvantage data governance solution from Varonis Systems last summer, I mentioned that a UNIX version of the solution would be forthcoming. Well, it’s now available, and any company that keeps any sort of data in unstructured formats in a UNIX environment should have a look. It’s one more way to protect the assets you hold in unstructured data.

Data governance is the framework of people, permissions and processes that are employed in the proper use of data. By some estimates, between 80 and 90 percent of companies' intellectual property and confidential customer data is unstructured data such as documents, CAD data, media files, blueprints, source code, spreadsheets and presentations. DatAdvantage and its companion product DataPrivilege are designed to help you understand and control who is accessing your data, when and how.

In my recent chat with Varonis founder and CEO Yaki Faitelson, he disclosed tremendous growth for his company in 2007. This is not surprising; in the past year or so, we’ve seen a marked shift in companies jumping on the data governance bandwagon. With so many costly and high profile data breaches making headlines, companies would rather spend a little bit of money preventing a mess than a lot of money cleaning up a mess.

According to the 2007 Ponemon Institute benchmark study Annual Study: U.S. Cost of a Data Breach, “The total averages costs of a data breach grew to $197 per record compromised, an increase of 8 percent since 2006 and 43 percent compared to 2005. The average total cost per reporting company was more than $6.3 million per breach and ranged from $225,000 to almost $35 million.”

Today as a result of compliance requirements, corporate governance has moved beyond the board of directors and has migrated to other corporate assets such as data and technology. Data governance is one of the critical aspects of the broader principle of IT Governance, Risk and Compliance (IT GRC). Large organizations that are implementing an IT GRC platform would want to include data governance input to present a more complete view of what risks the company may be facing, and how well the company is doing in complying with government regulations and mandates as well as internal policies.

I’m pleased to hear from Faitelson that Varonis has been building APIs that will help feed data governance information into IT GRC frameworks. It’s one more way to break down the silos of information that hide the full picture of who, what, when and how.