NEW YORK, April 7, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Loyola University Maryland, a leading private, Jesuit university, feared the possibility of falling victim to a fate that other major universities around them had experienced: a major data breach. In the months following the early 2014 attack on a major university nearby, Loyola's CIO, Louise Finn, proactively explored various solutions that could mitigate risk in the event of a similar attack, but the technologies she probed could not provide reliable and detailed insights. That's when Finn and her IT team discovered Varonis Systems, Inc., and its DatAdvantage solution.
Providing the Most Holistic Approach to Data Security
After their trial of the solution, the Loyola University Maryland IT team quickly determined that DatAdvantage could provide everything they were looking for. The level of accuracy and breadth of features demonstrated during the DatAdvantage trial were unprecedented in their experience.
CIO Finn explained, "A real differentiator between Varonis DatAdvantage and the other solutions we explored was its breadth of features. It finds your sensitive data, gives you the ability to track it and assess it against baseline end-user activity, and automatically alerts you when abnormal behaviors begin to happen. If an employee is leaving the institution, they often decide to download whatever they want, maybe not realizing those files belong to the university. DatAdvantage allows us to see what's happening and gives us the ability to take action if we need to."
Tom Podles, Director of Infrastructure at Loyola University Maryland, said, "There are two things that you want do for security. You want to prevent people who aren't supposed to get to your sensitive data, from getting to your sensitive data. But you also need to be able to audit your data inventory to moderate access and ensure that those who need access to the data have it, and that they are using it correctly. Varonis is one of the few security solutions that actually does both."
Tackling the Impossible, Creating New Opportunities
The level of functionality and information that DatAdvantage provided the Loyola University Maryland IT team was previously unobtainable. Without DatAdvantage, IT would have had to manually go through each folder to get the level of accurate insight that Varonis provides – a futile task. Loyola plans to roll out Varonis DataPrivilege in the next few months, putting file access management in the hands of data owners and freeing up more time for the IT staff.
According to Dave Opitz, the university's Senior Security Analyst for Technology Services, "The new insights allow us to quickly prioritize our security efforts and educate employees on data storage practices."
Additional Resources
- Read the Loyola University Maryland Case Study here.
- For more information on Varonis' solution portfolio, please visit www.varonis.com.
- Join the Varonis conversation on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube.
About Varonis
Varonis is the leading provider of software solutions for unstructured, human-generated enterprise data. Varonis provides an innovative software platform that allows enterprises to map, analyze, manage and migrate their unstructured data. Varonis specializes in human-generated data, a type of unstructured data that includes an enterprise's spreadsheets, word processing documents, presentations, audio files, video files, emails, text messages and any other data created by employees. This data often contains an enterprise's financial information, product plans, strategic initiatives, intellectual property and numerous other forms of vital information. IT and business personnel deploy Varonis software for a variety of use cases, including data governance, data security, archiving, file synchronization, enhanced mobile data accessibility and information collaboration. As of December 31, 2014, Varonis had more than 3,300 customers, spanning leading firms in the financial services, public, healthcare, industrial, energy & utilities, technology, consumer and retail, education and media & entertainment sectors.