Symantec Corp., a provider of security, storage and systems management solutions, has released Symantec Data Insight 3.0, the latest version of its solution that helps improve information governance by providing information about ownership and usage of unstructured data such as documents, presentations, spreadsheets and emails. With data volumes growing rapidly, and unstructured data in the enterprise growing even faster, Symantec says it is becoming increasingly difficult for organizations to stay on top of who owns the data and how it is being used. This makes it challenging to manage and protect it, a situation further complicated by data governance objectives to reduce costs, reduce risk and achieve compliance.
"This release extends our leadership in large-scale automation, performance, and comprehensive coverage," Ketan Shah, principal product manager, Symantec Storage & Availability Management Group, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Symantec Data Insight 3.0 is unique in delivering actionable information through its console but also through its range of integrations, he adds.
Symantec Data Insight seeks to address challenges in achieving insight into unstructured data ownership and access by continuously monitoring data usage and enabling rule-based inferences for data ownership. Understanding how data is being used enables effective unstructured data management operations - facilitating tasks such as reclamation and chargeback, and, by assigning data ownership, IT organizations can establish a framework for collaboration with the business to address data governance objectives, says Symantec. According to Symantec, since the initial launch of Data Insight, the company has seen broad adoption by organizations using the solution to reduce storage costs, simplify protection of critical data, and meet compliance objectives.
Data Insight's detailed data usage analytics of unstructured data, such as growth, frequency of access, inactive data, and user activity are essential to reducing storage costs and streamlining unstructured data storage operations such as reclamation, tiering, migration to cloud storage and capacity planning, Symantec says. Rapid growth of unstructured data and the emergence of big data are significantly increasing the magnitude of the operations challenge. Data Insight is particularly well-suited to support large-scale data management operations with its highly scalable and parallel architecture. With optimizations in collection, indexing and query algorithms, Data Insight provides actionable analytics with enhanced performance at very large scale, notes Shah, who says that Symantec worked on developing new features for Data Insight with organizations dealing with hundreds of terabytes, millions of folders, and thousands of data owners.
Symantec Data Insight 3.0 helps storage, security and compliance professionals enable the data owners inside the business to better manage and protect unstructured data through a new data custodian management feature, notes Shah. With Data Custodian Management, Data Insight bridges the gap between IT and business, says Shah, by helping to automate the discovery and management of custodians for unstructured data within the business. This allows IT to automatically engage the business owners or custodians with usage, permissions, and classification reporting and analytics, enabling better stewardship of data resources.
Ensuring protection of confidential data, Symantec continues to strengthen the integration between Symantec Data Insight and Symantec Data Loss Prevention. Features such as risk scoring and sensitive data alerts, combine Data Loss Prevention's content-awareness with Data Insight's usage and permissions analysis to help prioritize remediation of data based on risk. In addition, through Data Insight's integration with the Aveksa Access Governance suite, organizations can establish business processes to control who can access key data resources across the enterprise. By incorporating the ownership and access information discovered by Symantec's Data Insight into the Aveksa system, organizations can more efficiently achieve compliance and enforce access policies.
Supporting data coverage, Data Insight 3.0 now features a new integration point with Veritas Storage Foundation 6.0. Customers using Storage Foundation for file serving can now leverage Data Insight for their data management needs. Data Insight also features enhanced operations for NetApp network attached storage (NAS) and expanded coverage to support both CIFS and NFS protocols.
Data Insight provides support for leading platforms such as NetApp NAS, EMC NAS, Windows File Servers, Microsoft SharePoint, and Unix File Servers with Veritas Storage Foundation file system, and also offers support for leading directory services, such as Microsoft Active Directory, LDAP, and NIS/NIS+.
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