Many businesses are now increasingly keen on monitoring what data their staff are accessing, especially when it resides outside conventional enterprise systems and databases (so called unstructured data). So says data governance software provider Varonis, which also revealed it is planning a major new software upgrade in the new year.
Unstructured data is typically made up of emails, Word documents, and third-party files, and is rapidly becoming a growing headache for today’s IT and storage managers. HP last month warned that IT managers were “grossly underestimating” the explosion of unstructured data in the enterprise.
Speaking to Techworld last week, Varonis spoke of witnessing a growing need from companies looking to audit unstructured data usage. “This can either be because of regulations, or internal reasons, or an incident that has happened, or the company is anticipating an incident,” said Johnnie Konstantas, VP of marketing.
According to Konstantas, regulation is a big pull for this auditing. “The world is changing, companies want transparency about who is using what data,” she said. “Companies have been ignoring unstructured data for years because there was no way to protect and sort it. But as many have shown, unstructured data is rapidly growing.”
“80 percent of a company’s data store is unstructured data, and until a few years ago it wasn’t protected,” she said. Back in July, Varonis funded a survey that found corporate information stored on file servers and network attached storage (NAS) devices was in danger of being compromised. This was because IT governance policies and access rules in many companies are incapable of dealing with a massive growth of unstructured data.