Visibility, according to Merriam-Webster, means ‘capable of being seen’. It is not a new term in technology or cybersecurity. However, it is one that is commonly overused, stretched, inflated, exaggerated, and even hyped beyond the reality of what is being seen and what is not.
After all, the point of visibility is not simply to ‘see’ what we can, but to also ‘understand’ what it is we have. We want, and need, to understand what we have so we can make better, informed decisions about what’s possible, what’s missing, and what’s next.
This is exactly the goal of ‘visibility’ in the field of data security… to understand what we have, where it is, who has access and what we need to do to protect it. Yet, visibility remains elusive, or at least, limited in terms of which data vendors actually help their customers see and protect versus the total data a customer has within their environment.
You Can’t Protect What You Can’t See
As an example, let’s compare the Varonis Data Security Platform to our NVISIONx Nx Data Risk Intelligence Platform. Varonis offers ‘visibility’ into approximately 20 unstructured data stores and offers a relevant set of access provisioning controls with basic analytic capabilities. Aren’t some of the company’s most sensitive data stored in databases? Is being limited to unstructured data for only a handful of key enterprise applications and data repositories enough? Most enterprises have data stored across hundreds of applications. This makes you wonder, “…what’s happening to other business critical data that I can’t see with Varonis?”
To the contrary, our Nx Data Risk Intelligence Platform provides the industry’s most complete coverage across the enterprise for identifying, classifying and protecting all your data that matters. The Nx Platform has broader and deeper integration for over 400 applications and data stores including structured databases in your datacenter or in the cloud. That’s more than 20x of Varonis’ data visibility.
Privacy Data is Important… So is Other Business Data
While privacy data (PI, PII, and PHI), PCI and SOX must be controlled and protected in compliance with regulatory mandates, for some companies, this may only account for a small percentage of the organization’s overall data set. Simple data discovery tools (such as Varonis) only query and find well-defined data, such as that is privacy-oriented in nature. What about other data that is unknown but may still present a risk to competitive advantage, operational resiliency or brand credibility if lost or stolen? What you don’t know, could put your company at greater risk than a compliance violation.
Our Nx Platform takes a different approach to enterprise data protection to ensure everything is identified and classified, and what needs to be protected is actually safe. It conducts fast and efficient inventory scans to reliably identify everything that is stored within each application or data store. It then uses several analytical models ranging from rules-based through to ML and AI to systematically dissect every file and database table to find, log and classify unique attributes that indicate sensitivity and could pose business risk if mishandled. It helps you to quickly make sense of truly complex data such as intellectual property, design files, research data, business strategies, competitive intelligence, board communications, and merger and acquisition materials.
You Can’t Control What You Don’t Understand
We all like pictures. They help us understand data and make sense of it more quickly. That’s why, unlike Varonis’ tabular, technology-centric dashboards and reporting mechanisms that make it difficult to recognize trends, groupings, and other relationships between different types of data, our Nx Platform delivers rich, vibrant graphics, customizable dashboards with workflow automation and notification capabilities that are business-friendly, intuitive, and highly interactive with drill-down features for any visual object.
The reality is first-generation ‘visibility’ tools of enterprise data protection and security barely scratch the surface of what is possible, and quite frankly, necessary to truly enable an organization to realize the power of its data; to meaningfully protect its IP and the privacy-oriented data of its customers its stores; and to streamline costs and efficiencies. First-generation tools such as Varonis are keeping customers in the dark. It’s time to take enterprise data visibility and security to a new level, to change the conversation. This is what we do at NVISIONx and we’d love to show you how.
For more details on how we compare to Varonis, check out our page here: WHY NVISIONx page and reach out to us to schedule a demo.