NetVision Announces Enhanced Access Rights Reporting, Netapp User Activity Monitoring

The newest release of NetVision's access auditing and management suite features enhanced reporting on the state of access rights in the organization and support for user activity and permission changes in NetApp network attached storage (NAS). NetVision's suite is focused on activity monitoring and access rights status reporting, what Steve Coplan, senior analyst in The 451 Group's Enterprise Security Practice, calls this access auditing or access visibility auditing. It's focused on Active Directory, as well as Novell eDirectory as access control mechanisms to corporate file shares.

"There is a lot of valuable data sitting in file share," said Coplan. "You can authenticate someone to that file share, but you don't necessarily know what resides in that file share or what that authentication should or shouldn't authorize users to do."

This visibility, he said is an essential first step to developing to developing an effective identity and access management program. "Until I know who is accessing what," he said, "I can't begin to define what's at risk and what are appropriate policies."

NetVision's prime market is with mid-sized enterprises and their average customer has 5,200 IT supported users, they say. The focus on assessment of permissions in Active Directory and file shares is well suited for these organizations, in contrast to large enterprise Identity Management (IdM) suites from CA, IBM, Novell, Oracle and RSA, Coplan said. NetVision's competition in the access auditing space comes more from companies like Quest Software and Varonis.

NVMonitor provides real-time monitoring of user activity (opening, creating, modifying files) and permission changes. The new support for NetApp NAS reflects the way many organizations are using NAS for active file sharing in the enterprise, as well as back-end storage, as storage prices come down and file sharing develops, often as an ad hoc process."The driver for NetApp is a question of 'Do you know what resides within those repositories?'" said Coplan. "Unstructured data is the next wave in terms of security challenges. As access control and information governance and e-discovery start to get harmonized, the question is what do you do with unstructured data."

NVAssess enables organizations to execute queries about given file systems, such as accounts that haven't had password changes in 90 days or haven't been used in 60 days. "The best use case for NVAssess is in banks that are audited a lot, such as financial institutions," said Matt Flynn, NetVision director of marketing and strategy. Organizations can get quick responses to audit questions that might otherwise take hours or days, he said.

Access Rights Inspector automates the process of evaluating user and group permissions and identifying inappropriate permissions, unused groups, high-risk accounts, and files that may be accessed against policy. The latest version provides enhanced dashboard-level reporting and detailed information on the current status of user and group permissions to give enterprises a baseline of their current environment and what needs to "be cleaned up."

"You have a central way of saying these are all the access rights this individual has, the rights this group has, who has ownership of assigning those, what is delegating process," Coplan said. "The ability to do all that significantly improves the organization's ability to implement a structured, sustainable approach to access management."

Pricing for the NetVision suite starts at $25 per user; individual products start at $13 per user.