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September 25, 2012

Varonis Helps Isis Pharmaceutical Track Who's Looking at What Files



Varonis, a provider of data governance software, today confirmed that Isis Pharmaceuticals will use its DatAdvantage to manage and monitor file access activity, and see just who exactly is getting access to which files. Isis was finding it increasingly more complex to keep track of its permission infrastructure. Using the intelligence collected by DatAdvantage, Isis is able to easily determine who has access to any particular folder. Conversely it can also discover which folders a user or group has access to.Isis Pharmaceuticals, which develops drugs for cardiovascular, metabolic, severe and rare diseases, and cancer, helps researchers go from genes to drugs in the ongoing search for new drugs to treat illnesses.  

"Often I would need to mirror permissions for one user to another but this was easier said than done,” said Shannon McVeigh, responsible for infrastructure support, in the statement. “Groups in Active Directory did not correlate to the names of the folders. In honesty I didn't have an easy way to determine exactly who had access to what. Now, with DatAdvantage, when I want to add any user to a group, I can see exactly what they will have access to on the filers when the change is made. I can also see which filer has different securities, and even what does or doesn't inherit what."

More than 95 percent of file access activity is not audited by IT, mainly because event auditing can be cumbersome and complex. But, this is a dangerous situation for a pharmaceutical company because only those with rights to see confidential data should be seeing it and it’s important to track who is handling which files.  Using DatAdvantage, Isis is able to determine which users have been added, or even removed, from any group and exactly when it was completed. Using these reports can also help it to demonstrate compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements.Isis has found that, since deploying DatAdvantage, it can clean up its files if they haven’t been used in a while. DatAdvantage allows the company to collect statistics to determine who is getting access to which files the most, or which files are not being accessed at all, helping with eliminating unnecessary files and archiving of stale data, in the future.

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Edited by Amanda Ciccatelli
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