Are you working to prevent being the next Wikileak?

Despite all the news surrounding WikiLeaks and the immense amount of data stolen from the US government, little has been written about the organisational processes that contributed to the leaks, how the soldier who stole the data had access to such sensitive data in the first place, and how digital collaboration has increased to the point where these incidents will likely become commonplace unless root causes are identified and addressed.

“Organisations are becoming significantly more collaborative,” said Yaki Faitelson, chief executive officer, president and co-founder of Varonis Systems. “As a result, data is more widespread and vulnerable than ever before.

For organisations to prevent loss of sensitive data while still enabling the collaboration needed to conduct business, they need to ensure that they have processes and automation in place for authorization and review of access to data, monitoring who is using data, and identifying sensitive data that is at risk.”

Unstructured and semi-structured data on shared file systems, NAS devices, SharePoint sites and Exchange mailboxes is a challenge to manage for any organisation.

According to analyst firm Gartner, all of the documents stored in these repositories – such as spreadsheets, presentations, documents, and multimedia files – account for roughly 80 per cent of business data. By its very nature, this shared data is highly dynamic, and growing by about 50 per cent each year.

Another issue is that the relevance of data is constantly in flux, changing far faster than each user’s access rights. Users are often able to download or edit data they no longer need access to long after a project finishes or their role has changed.

A key part of the solution is metadata – data about data (or information about information) – and the technology needed to leverage it. When it comes to identifying sensitive data, and protecting access to it, a number of types of metadata are relevant: user and group information, permissions information, access activity, and sensitive content indicators.