30 January 2014

The University of West Scotland (UWS) is using data governance software from Varonis to track and monitor which of its 2,000 users across four campuses are accessing its resources and what they are doing.

UWS – which is said to be Scotland's largest modern university – has implemented DatAdvantage for Windows as part of its ICT audit. Varonis says UWS will use the software to answer the fundamental question of who had access to its shared drives with a comparative degree of detail and granularity.

The university’s assistant director of ICT support David Johnston said that he first came across Varonis in early 2012. “At that time we simply were unable to monitor access activity on the shared drives and, following an internal audit, we knew this potentially introduced exposure risks to the network. Using the information DatAdvantage aggregates for us we’re now confident that we know exactly what is happening on our shared drives. This means that we can perform a full and thorough ICT audit of access activity.”

Johnston said that when the university first deployed DatAdvantage, it wasn’t really looking at the “bigger picture”. However, since using the system it has realised that the software can do much more than just audit user activity.

“We can now pinpoint exactly when a file was moved, deleted or renamed, and who did it. This wasn’t something we knew we wanted, or even looked to resolve originally, but it’s a fantastic function,” he said.

Using DatAdvantage, UWS aggregates its user and group details, ACL information and all data access events. Varonis says that this allows it to build a complete picture of who can, and who is, accessing data. It also leads IT administrators to rightful data owners, so the right people can ensure appropriate access and usage.

Additionally, with the Varonis Data Classification framework, the IT department can immediately identify folders with excessive permissions that contain quantities of sensitive data.