‘Unprecedented’ transparency into data access and usage

As the holiday season produces massive volumes of data on consumer spending trends, the global information experts at the NPD Group are benefitting from unprecedented transparency into data access and usage. The reason is technology from Varonis Systems, Inc., a provider of software solutions for unstructured, human-generated enterprise data. The NPD Group relies on Varonis DatAdvantage to monitor, analyse and manage who has access to the company’s valuable data, and to successfully limit security exposure, meet industry security regulations and improve the efficiency with which the organisation can handle the management of permission requests.

Friday, 17th January 2014 Posted 10 years ago in by Phil Alsop

Al Mujtaba, NPD Group’s VP of Enterprise Systems, said, “We brought Varonis DatAdvantage in as a security solution, but it’s so much more than that at the end of the day. Ultimately, it helps me make better decisions around our environment and it helps with planning.”

As a leading global information company, and a renowned authority on everything from consumers’ holiday spending trends to market acceptance of the latest technology gadgets, the NPD Group relies on leading-edge data management and delivery systems to produce the intelligence its clients need to make better business decisions. This data-intensive culture develops products and solutions for NPD clients that include tracking services, analytic solutions and advisory services.

In order to meet compliance regulations for access controls, NPD needed to have policies and procedures in place to restrict data to authorised users and to review users’ access rights on an ongoing basis. With DatAdvantage, NPD is now able to create reports across Windows shares, UNIX/Linux systems and SharePoint that provide full insight into who has access to which files and who is actually accessing the data in order to more efficiently enable the organisation to meet ISO 27001 regulations. Additionally, by reviewing the log activity, system admins can now spot unusual activities and immediately close any security holes.

“Before Varonis, we were getting requests for upwards of ten tickets per week to perform restores for files that were thought to be deleted,” NPD’s Mujtaba said. “A restore costs $300 to recall the tape and install the file in our environment, involving about four or five man hours. With DatAdvantage, we discovered that the data was often accidentally moved to another location by the user. This was a significant savings in terms of staff resources and money.”

Because NPD’s data set is available to a constantly changing pool of consultants, it was necessary for the system admins to regularly monitor and update permissions. With DatAdvantage, access controls have been improved, access to critical data is monitored and the data is better protected.

David Gibson, Varonis VP, said, “NPD Group tracks businesses representing over $1 trillion in sales. This includes staggering amounts of data. With the help of Varonis, they are able to more effectively and efficiently manage their data and both achieve and surpass industry regulations, while boosting productivity. We are helping thousands of organisations worldwide, from the largest corporations down to 20-person data-intensive organisations, do the same things.”