TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Varonis Data Security Platform

Score9.1 out of 10

34 Reviews and Ratings

What is Varonis Data Security Platform?

Varonis offers their Data Security Platform, a modular suite of data acess and data security products providing sensitive data discovery, data access governance, unusual behavior detection, GDPR compliance support, as well as incident playbooks and cybersecurity forensic reporting.

Data Classification is important, so select the best tool.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The application is used by the IT Department and is implemented enterprise wide. We use the product as a part of our defense in depth approach to cyber-security. The tool enable our enterprise to monitor PII in a way we were not able to monitor it prior. The tool also provides significant reporting tools that we use to augment our monthly security meetings.

Pros

  • This tool allows us to protect sensitive data.
  • It also improves our ability to maintain compliance with many different requirements.
  • The tool also permits auditing capabilities that we did not have prior to its implementation.
  • The tools also proactively alerts us to potential ransomware related events.

Cons

  • The tool is vast and it takes a significant amount of time to tune it for your evironment.
  • The report formatting is rudimentary and takes a while to get use to for staff.
  • The integration to our SIEM could be better.

Most Important Features

  • The ability to work through remediation through the Varonis interface is excellent.
  • The reporting options are very helpful.
  • The alerting works exactly as designed.
  • The administrative interface works as expected and it is easy to set up rules within the tool.

Return on Investment

  • We have identified data classifications issues that our organization was not aware of prior to the implementation.
  • The tool does take a dedicated resource for it to be effective.
  • Varonis has improved the speed with which we can fulfill audit requests, leaving us more time for other tasks.

Alternatives Considered

SolarWinds Access Rights Manager (ARM)

Varonis is a great tool for watching over and reporting on your environment. It helps you sleep at night!

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Varonis to audit our Isilon file servers. We have used this software to identify sensitive data locations and locations that need to be more secure. This software has helped us automate a lot of the processes to secure these data locations. It took us a few months to fix these issues; whereas, it would have taken maybe years to repair manually. We are also using this to help us identify the presence of malware and alert us if any is detected and logoff any offending user.

Pros

  • Varonis logging is very robust and captures all audit events being sent from the file servers.
  • The ability to report and alert on Active Directory account events works very well with file activity monitoring. It can show the complete picture of what an account did while being used.
  • Have a customizable dashboard is great for being able to show upper management information that only pertains to them.

Cons

  • Some of the reporting interfaces are difficult to navigate and appear somewhat dated.
  • This software does require a lot of servers to be built for various purposes.
  • Varonis is on the pricey side and now requires subscription based licensing. This can present problems is your company tries to use very little OpX spending vs CapX.

Most Important Features

  • Malware alerting
  • File system auditing
  • User event auditing for cloud and on-prem

Return on Investment

  • Varonis has only been a positive impact on our environment, but helping us close security holes that we didn't know existed.
  • This product has also provided piece of mind by watching our environment for Malware attacks and taking automatic actions if necessary.
  • This software does require a fair amount of server resources, but fortunately can be hosted in a virtual environment and has made this need easier to handle.

Other Software Used

Microsoft Azure Active Directory, CyberArk Privileged Account Security, Proofpoint Advanced Threat Protection

Varonis Data Security Platform Monitors and Protects Your Data

Pros

  • Monitors and reports file and folder access and usage.
  • Provides for assigned folder owners who can receive reports and manage access themselves.

Cons

  • The reports can take some time to get used to creating and running. It can take some trial and error to determine the correct rule sets to get the information you need. The information is there. It may just take some time to set it up correctly. Once you find the right settings, you can save it for use later.
  • It does have a lot of different tie-in to other products, which can take some time to set up correctly. It would be good if that could be simplified.

Return on Investment

  • It has reduced the amount of time and success in determining what has happened to missing files and folders. Anytime one of these disappears, someone wants to know what happened to it and who did it. In the past, we were not able to provide this information.
  • It has assisted us in determining why a service type account locks and from the source. These have caused issues in the past in determining the source and when it locked. Many times the information would be on one of several DC's or could have possibly rolled off the logs by the time we checked on it.

Other Software Used

Turbonomic (formerly VMTurbo), Proofpoint Email Protection, Dell EMC Avamar

Varonis is a great tool to use for data security

Pros

  • Varonis accurately detects critical data on our file servers and classify them based on the type of data.
  • Encrypt all data as configured to secure the data from unauthorized access.
  • Alerting and reports gave us information that we did not have before.

Cons

  • The web interface is somewhat limited in terms of functionality
  • More licenses are required for additional features. This increases the cost to implement.
  • Customized reporting is lacking.

Return on Investment

  • It shielded us and reduced the risk of data leaks that we can potentially be sued for.
  • It helped us with PCI compliance since we introduced new systems that process financial data and we increased our sales with all the systems integrations.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

AlienVault USM and Asset Panda

Other Software Used

Netwrix Auditor

Keeping an eye in the sky

Pros

  • Varonis 7 offers real time alerting which benefits the swift action of analysts.
  • Multiple file servers can be monitored by Varonis without a heavy performance interaction.
  • Varonis is capable of meeting several industry compliance standards.

Cons

  • The Web UI could have more in-depth analysis on alerts.
  • Amount of services installed is high.
  • Additional licenses have to be purchased for additional features.

Return on Investment

  • Varonis helped detect unethical activity from an internal employee.
  • Varonis meets several compliance controls for the organization.

Other Software Used

ExtraHop, Sophos Intercept X