White Papers for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

Fixing the Everyone Problem

Varonis Systems

Successful securities organizations excel at adapting to change, and Information Technology typically plays an important role in this agility. Data drives much of the securities business, and it has to be created, stored and shared at a rapid clip to keep pace with customers and competitors. Gartner, Inc. estimates that the volume of “unstructured” data (e.g., documents, spreadsheets, presentations, images, etc.) in an organization doubles every three months or so. There’s so much of this unstructured information, in fact, that it accounts for more than 80% of all enterprise data in most organizations.

Even with regulations, industry best-practices and the purest of intentions, it seems nearly impossible to keep track of who has – and needs – access to all of this information, and who doesn’t. And, as news articles continue to remind us, the unfortunate truth is that employees, contractors and consultants don’t always do the right thing with their access privileges.

Even in the securities and financial industries, if you think your IT organization has data access permissions under control, you may want to dig a little deeper. Most IT organizations grant access readily, yet revoke it infrequently. So, don’t assume that only the human resources group can see the human resources data, or that an employee who left the company last week had all her permissions revoked. The permissions to access the data on your file servers are very likely too permissive. This situation is not an oversight, nor the sign of a lax IT organization. It is just that the technology to solve this in a practical, manageable way did not exist until recently.

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