Likewise unveils software to give companies better control of unstructured data

Likewise announced Thursday new software to better access, secure, manage and audit unstructured data across multiple platforms – financial files, medical records, office documents, media and big data files, which account for nearly half of all stored information.

Companies have been limited in their ability to control unstructured data across multiple platforms. Likewise Data Analytics and Governance, the new application available now as a public software beta, gives organizations greater visibility into their unstructured data for improved security, auditing and compliance.

The Likewise Storage Services platform, used by such OEM storage vendors as HP and EMC Isilon, offers a consistent security model for file-based access and cross-platform, unified storage across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Likewise Storage Services provides integrated identity and access management, as well as secure access to data from Windows, Unix and Linux systems. Supported protocols include SMB/CIFS 1.0, 2.0, 2.1, NFS 3.0, and a RESTful API. Likewise Storage Services is available with a commercial license from Likewise Software.

“With 40 percent of unstructured data classified as sensitive and only 14 percent of organizations with a plan for managing that data, it is a critical and growing challenge to secure and govern data, and extract information,” said Barry Crist, CEO, Likewise. “Likewise intersects identity, security and storage to harness and secure data, track and manage who has access to what data, and free its use to make the most of it.”

Likewise Data Analytics and Governance enables organizations to implement a set of automated best practices to secure and manage unstructured data. The application uses analytics to contextualize data with user identity, sensitivity, and other information to mitigate risks, reduce costs and create value.

The software can help organizations understand performance and usage across storage pools, categorize unstructured data to create new applications or lines of business, and exploit data to maximize revenue. Companies can consolidate reporting across data silos, enforce consistent access policies, and manage entitlements from a single web console. The result is a global hierarchical view of an organization’s unstructured data that can identify and remediate root causes of security, performance and access issues.

"The problem with unstructured data has grown exponentially over time. It can seem insurmountable, but companies must get their arms around the sensitive data contained in these files,” said Ginny Roth, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Without the ability to have some glimpse into this data in the wild, companies will be increasingly vulnerable to high profile breaches."

The new Likewise application integrates with the Likewise Storage Services platform used by OEM network attached storage (NAS) vendors such as HP and EMC-Isilon, and has adapters that support NetApp, EMC-Celerra and other NAS filers.

The application monitors and audits usage, ownership and classification of data with dashboards and custom reports, manages and provisions entitlements from a single, central location, generates reports that demonstrate compliance, including reports for HIPAA, ITAR, PCI DSS, Sarbanes-Oxley, GLBA and FISMA, and receives real-time event alerts for policy-driven exception monitoring. It also uses analytics tools to get real-time and historical information on users and groups, file security settings, data sensitivity and access patterns, centrally views users, groups and netgroups in Microsoft Active Directory, LDAP or Sun Microsystems’ Network Information Service (NIS), identifies all CIFS and NFS users and workloads using NAS controllers, accepts events and log data from various sources through a predefined RESTful API, provides support for global environments and storage arrays with high workloads, feeds information to existing SIEM or reporting tools, works with NAS devices using the Likewise Storage, and offers services platform, as well as NetApp and EMC-Celerra NAS devices.

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