Symantec Data Insight 3.0

Symantec Corporation announced Data Insight 3.0, the version of its solution that improves information governance by providing intelligence into ownership and usage of unstructured data such as documents, presentations, spreadsheets and emails.

Enhancements to Data Insight help organizations transform storage operations and simplify information governance processes to reduce costs, reduce risk and achieve compliance.

According to Gartner, the growth rate of data is 40 to 60 percent; but for unstructured data in the enterprise, the growth rate can be up to 80 percent and is becoming increasingly difficult to manage and protect. IT organizations are faced with seemingly impossible data governance objectives to reduce costs, reduce risk and achieve compliance. IT lacks the business context for the data and must engage the data owners who best understand the value of the data. However, challenges in understanding who owns the data and how it is being used impact IT’s ability to operationalize data governance.

Data Insight addresses these challenges 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. By assigning data ownership, IT organizations can establish a framework for collaboration with the business to address data governance objectives. Since the initial launch, Symantec has seen broad adoption and use of Data Insight to reduce storage costs, simplify protection of critical data, and meet compliance.

Transform Storage Operations
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. Rapid growth of unstructured data and the emergence of Big Data are increasing the magnitude of the operations challenge. Data Insight is well-suited to support large-scale data management operations with its scalable and parallel architecture. With optimizations in collection, indexing and query algorithms, Data Insight delivers actionable analytics with enhanced performance across large data sets.

Empower the Business
Data Insight helps storage, security and compliance professionals empower the data owners inside the business to better manage and protect unstructured data through a new data custodian management feature.

• Data Custodian Management: Data Insight helps automate the discovery and management of custodians for unstructured data within the business. IT can automatically engage the custodians with valuable usage, permissions, and classification reporting and analytics, empowering the business to become better stewards of an organization’s resources.
• Managing Data Growth: It automates custodian reviews of inactive or orphan data facilitating storage remediation actions, such as deletion, archival, or migration as well as assisting with data retention guidelines based on data ownership classification. Data Insight’s ownership and usage capabilities help organizations build a consumption-based chargeback model to promote accountability for efficient use of the storage.
• Protecting Confidential Data: Symantec continues to strengthen the integration between Data Insight and 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. Data Insight’s custodian management feature will streamline the risk remediation process, especially important given the rapid growth of unstructured data.
• Governing Access to Data: 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 Data Insight into the Aveksa system, organizations can achieve compliance and better enforce access policies.

Comprehensive Coverage
Data Insight 3.0 now features an 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 NAS and expanded coverage to support both CIFS and NFS protocols.

Data Insight provides support for platforms such as NetApp NAS, EMC NAS, Windows File Servers, Microsoft SharePoint, and Unix File Servers with Veritas Storage Foundation file system. Data Insight also provides support for leading directory services, such as Microsoft Active Directory, LDAP, and NIS/NIS+.

"Data Insight has given us a better understanding of how unstructured data is being created, used, stored, and retained," said Starla Rivers, Sr. Information Security Architect, Sharp HealthCare. "With the integration between Data Insight and Symantec’s Data Loss Prevention solution, we are able to identify and manage data by content, access, age and risk. This allows us to work with the business custodians to protect that data through tighter access controls and a clean-up process. This is helping us with our data governance objectives of gaining efficiency and reducing risk."

"NetApp and Symantec are committed to delivering innovative solutions that help our mutual customers employ new strategies to manage, retain and protect growing data volumes," said Chris Cummings, vice president, products and solutions marketing, NetApp. "The combined strengths of Symantec Data Insight integrated with NetApp’s high performance storage systems enables organizations to better understand who owns information, how it’s being accessed, and how it’s being used to accelerate the business. This in-depth understanding helps customers efficiently manage data growth, make better decisions and drive successful business outcomes at the speed of today’s business."

"Data Insight provides visibility into the who and how as context to ‘eating the elephant.’ Our enterprise customers large and small find the task of classifying information somewhat insurmountable based upon volume, complexity, and lack of visibility," said Marc Johnson, Practice Director for Data Center Management and Storage, Creative Breakthroughs, Inc. "Data Insight’s ownership and usage analytics help organizations link security, storage, and compliance in an unprecedented way. Never before have the walls crumbled between IT security and IT storage the way that Data Insight incites."

"With Symantec Data Insight and Aveksa integrated together, organizations can safely and efficiently delegate access decisions to the line-of-business custodians, while ensuring compliance with controls and constraints defined by Information Security," said Deepak Taneja, CTO at Aveksa. "Symantec Data Insight provides information on data resource ownership, classification and usage, and Aveksa leverages this to provide business-user-friendly access activities, including certification, access request, and access remediation. The end result is a full lifecycle management system for controlling enterprise access to applications and data."

"Data Insight demonstrates innovation and integration across Symantec’s security and storage portfolio," said Vivian Tero, Program Director for Governance, Risk and Compliance, IDC. "Data Insight’s data ownership and usage analysis benefits both storage and security stakeholders, by enabling efficient management of data growth to reduce cost and simplifying protection of sensitive data, regardless of where it is stored."

"It is difficult for most organizations to identify the data owners for a majority of the unstructured data in their organization," said Don Angspatt, vice president, product management, Storage and Availability Management Group, Symantec Corp. "Data Insight 3.0 enables our customers to not only identify data owners but also automatically engage them to reduce storage management costs, achieve compliance, and facilitate data protection, thereby increasing the effectiveness of an organization’s data governance initiatives."

Pricing and Availability
Data Insight is available. Estimated pricing starts at $5,000 USD with either a per user or per TB licensing option.