Today I am pleased to announce a new CTERA-Varonis partnership that enables the CTERA platform to integrate industry-leading data security and threat protection.
Please feel free to read today’s press release and to register for our joint webinar in a few weeks.
This is an exciting new alliance for many reasons, but perhaps above all because of the great synergy between advanced data security and threat protection tools and global file system technology – and importantly, the hyper demand for secure edge-to-cloud enterprise file services in the past 15 months.
I don’t need to tell you that COVID changed they way we work – perhaps forever. Enterprises are more distributed than ever, with WFH offices likely outnumbering HQ, branch, and satellite offices at most organizations. A Gartner survey found that nearly half of all employees will have at least a partial WFH entitlement post-COVID.
Most IT organizations are still forging their paths ahead, but what’s become evident in the past 15 months is that the modern file storage landscape has changed significantly, and serving the file services needs of users based on 1) work environment (HQ, branch, or home), 2) geographic location, and 3) device optionality presents a massive headache for admins.
Fortunately, this is exactly the purpose of a multi-cloud global file system: connecting core, branch, and #WFE (work from everywhere) users over a single namespace with HQ-grade data access experiences from any edge location or device. To put it another way, it’s keeping files close to users by extending the corporate file system to them – wherever they are.
Back to my earlier point about synergy. Once organizations understand they can extend corporate data policies to the far edge, advanced threat protection at the edge becomes a natural extension. What if you could layer on top of a global file system a comprehensive data classification, auditing, and access governance engine like the Varonis Data Security Platform? Now you have an integrated solution to protect files from edge to cloud – and you can understand why CTERA customers are excited about it.
(By the way, if you’re a Varonis customer with a big number of locations and users to manage, the integration with CTERA is synergistic on your end too: rather than deploy Varonis in every office you manage, you can integrate the Varonis platform once into the CTERA platform and extend Varonis’s data security capabilities to all sites.)
After spending some time getting a close look with our product team at Varonis’s platform, I can say the technology is even more impressive than I’d envisioned. The Varonis Data Security Platform is a sophisticated engine that can analyze massive amounts of data (like that of a global file system) and provide insights into what’s happening with your data, reduce risk, and investigate suspicious activity. It mitigates threats by comparing data activity with baseline behavioral profiles created using machine learning algorithms that detect abnormal user behaviors and trigger responses that stop attackers in their tracks and mitigate any potential damage.
Varonis correlates file activity from the CTERA platform into context with additional information such as data classification, authentication events, and network activity to provide a complete audit trail of user activity.
The CTERA Varonis partnership enables:
- IT departments to gain complete control over unstructured data
- Data classification including regulated, sensitive, and critical data
- Automatic detection and response to abnormal behavior that indicates threats such as ransomware, malware, and advanced persistent threats (APTs)
- Full visibility into users, groups, and folder permissions
- Detailed audit trail of every access event for compliance and forensics
- Security analytics with deep data context
- Customizable dashboards to remediate risk and monitor data
Ask any IT leader and they’ll tell you: all of the above is more important than ever given the distributed work/WFE dynamic of post-pandemic era. We’re thrilled to partner with Varonis to provide organizations with the data security foundations they need to transition to a new era of file storage and work.
Ready to get started? Check out our solution brief and schedule a demo with our expert engineers.
