Philip Morris International, CIBC and Alberta Energy Announced as Winners

New York (US) and London (UK), November 28th, 2012 – Varonis Systems Inc., the leading provider of comprehensive data governance software has announced the winners of its inaugural customer awards, naming Philip Morris International, CIBC and Alberta Government Ministry of Energy as winners, and Société Générale, BNP Paribas and AXA as Highly Commended entrants.

The Varonis Data Governance Awards opened in May, and all customers were invited to enter projects of which they were especially proud. Winners were selected based on a public vote and the views of a judging panel, which included Andras Cser from Forrester Research and Arthur J. Hedge III, from Castle Ventures LLC.

“Companies around the world are working very hard, every day, to deliver the highest possible standards of data governance. Because these projects are often hidden away in the background somewhere, they rarely get the visibility and acclaim they deserve. We are delighted to be able to publicly recognize the success of our customers, and thank them for their support of Varonis.” said Yaki Faitelson, CEO and co-founder of Varonis. 

Andras Cser from Forrester Research, Inc. said, “I was delighted to be part of the first Varonis Data Governance Awards, and to join the judging panel. The quality of entries was very high and showed the focus that companies large and small are putting on data governance, and how important they consider it to be for their entire organization.”

Arthur Hedge from Castle Ventures said, “The range of entries demonstrated the different ways that organizations are using Varonis to apply best practices to managing and governing their data, and how they have developed robust strategies based on their own circumstances and employees to really get a handle on their data and how to secure it. I was really pleased to see how many companies are forward-looking and proactive in how they protect themselves and their critical information.”

Jan Billiet, Director IS Security and Risk Management at Philip Morris International, winner of the Large Scale Implementation category said, “I am delighted that PMI has been named as a winner in these awards in recognition for the work we are doing around data governance. Since starting work with Varonis we are progressing towards our goal of global access control visibility and more streamlined access to the growing amount of data we had to manage, and winning this award will help us raise the profile of our project with our stakeholders.”

Eric Kamander, Identity Services Engineer at CIBC, winner of the Risk Reduction category said, “With more than 40,000 users and a petabyte of data, we needed to have complete visibility and transparency, to ensure we knew exactly who owned what data. This project also enabled us to delete stale data and save annual storage costs – while reducing any potential risks. Being recognized by Varonis in these awards is a much-appreciated external validation of our success.”

John Dauphinais, Network Analyst, IT Infrastructure, Alberta Dept. of Energy , winner of the Special Recognition Award said, “DatAdvantage was implemented in our organization a few years ago to administer day-to-day access requests and identify conflicts. Each time our group was confronted with a new security challenge, DatAdvantage provided us with key insights and a manageable path to the solution.  In recent months DatAdvantage has been introduced to records management specialists in our Department - and has already provided them with comprehensive usage analytics and the ability to focus on data at risk. I expect DatAdvantage will become increasingly integral in managing data security in our organization.”

Stephane Amate at Société Générale, highly commended in the Large Scale Implementation category said, “At Société Générale, we needed to give users the ability to manage their own data, whilst also identifying where all sensitive data was held. The project with Varonis enabled us to restructure our data so it was fully manageable, and then allowed each user to have control over all of their own data and who had permission to access it, which was impossible before. Being recognized in the Data Governance Awards helps us demonstrate internally just how well we did with this project.”

Stuart Lincoln, Vice President ITP&L Client Services at BNP Paribas and highly commended in the Best Practice Implementation category said, “We spent a lot of time working with all our teams internally to get our implementation right and to ensure that users fully understood what we were doing. We also implemented a comprehensive system on our intranet to provide a self-service function to data owners -  to ensure maximum adoption. The project has enabled us to ensure data is either allocated to an owner or archived – so we only store what we need to store.”

Serena Lee, Senior Security Analyst at AXA Wealth, highly commended in the Risk Reduction category said, Reducing risk is a fundamental aspect of our business, so AXA Wealth is proud to be recognized in the risk reduction category of the Varonis Awards. The Varonis products give us visibility into every file open, create, modify and delete by every user accessing the file server and as a result we always know what is happening and can identify any potential problems even before they occur.”

ABOUT VARONIS SYSTEMS

Varonis is the leader in unstructured and semi-structured data governance software. Based on patented technology and a highly accurate analytics engine, Varonis solutions give organizations total visibility and control over their data, ensuring that only the right users have access to the right data at all times from all devices, all use is monitored, and abuse is flagged.

Varonis makes digital collaboration secure, effortless and efficient so that people can create and share content easily with whom they must, and organizations can be confident their content is protected and managed efficiently.

Voted one of the "Fast 50 Reader Favorites" on FastCompany.com, and winner of the SC Magazine Innovation, Product or Service of the Year, and Best Network Security Awards, Varonis has more than 4,500 installations worldwide and is headquartered in New York, with regional offices in Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Varonis, the Varonis logo, DatAdvantage®, DataPrivilege® and the IDU Classification Framework® are registered trademarks of Varonis® Systems in the United States and/or other countries and Metadata Framework™, DatAnywhere™, and Data Transport Engine™ are under a registration process in the United States and/or other countries. All other product and company names and marks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only.www.varonis.com

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