DatAdvantage as vital as an insurance policy to the municipal government
New York: City of Buffalo (New York) today confirmed that it is using Varonis® DatAdvantage® to manage and audit its access activity. Using DatAdvantage, City of Buffalo can look internally to see what is happening with unstructured data stored within its network. DatAdvantage captures, aggregates, normalizes, and analyzes permissions and every file access event, such as open, move, delete, etc., for every user allowing City of Buffalo to answer the otherwise impossible questions of who is accessing which folder, what data they can see, who has deleted a file and where did a file go.
City of Buffalo’s utilization of DatAdvantage has been likened by city personnel as similar to an insurance policy, much like that of car or building insurance, in that you rarely contemplate having it until it’s needed, and then its importance is evident. This was tested recently following two incidences of files mysteriously disappearing. Using the solution, city IT personnel determined exactly what had happened and, even more importantly, that a genuine mistake had been made and the action was not malicious. “In a very practical sense it eased our concerns as we were able to determine that those deletions weren’t malicious which simply would not have been possible previously. That’s a real time practical use that we’ve put to the product.”
City of Buffalo personnel are also using DatAdvantage to organize and codify legacy user account permissions that were associated with network resources prior to the current process for assignment via Active Directory network security groups. Some areas of the City of Buffalo’s Active Directory were a “bit of a basement,” since using DatAdvantage, the IT department has turned those undocumented areas into a very effective, efficient and intuitive warehouse … “The thing with Varonis is it gives you that stand off capability but then allows you to almost instantly come in and work to a fine gradient of detail that, without it, would take hours and hours.”
Moving forward, the City of Buffalo will perform the same inspection, review and editing of access permissions throughout the entire enterprise, empowering the organization to perform surveillance and quality control over what’s coming in and going out.