Type Public Industry Computer software Area served Worldwide CEO Yaki Faitelson (2004–) Number of employees 1,000 (2017) | Traded as NASDAQ: VRNS Founded 2004 Headquarters United States of America Revenue 164.5 million USD (2016) | |
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Founder Yaki Faitelson
Ohad Korkus Stock price VRNS (NASDAQ) US$ 31.80 +0.55 (+1.76%)31 Mar, 4:00 PM GMT-4 - Disclaimer Profiles | ||
Varonis Systems is an American software company with headquarters in New York City. They developed a security software platform to let organizations track, visualize, analyze and protect their unstructured data. Varonis performs User Behavior Analytics (UBA) to identify abnormal behavior and defend enterprise data from cyberattacks. Their software extracts metadata from an enterprise’s IT infrastructure and uses this information to map relationships among employees, data objects, content, and usage - giving organizations more visibility into their data, and protecting their critical and sensitive information.
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History
Varonis Systems was founded in 2004 by Yaki Faitelson and Ohad Korkus, in order to address security issues such as file activity tracking, information rights management, and access control. Prior to Varonis, Mr. Faitelson and Mr. Korkus held leadership positions in the global professional services and systems integration divisions of NetVision and NetApp.
In 2003, a number of critical files - expensive, high res images of the ocean floor - disappeared suddenly from the file servers where they were stored. The energy company that had spent millions of dollars to create those images wanted to know who deleted the files, and who had access to the folders holding the files. Storage experts Faitelson and Korkus quickly realized that there were no existing systems able to answer these questions, and founded Varonis in order to create a better way to protect, track, analyze, and visualize data.
Faitelson and Korkus invented a solution that would retrieve metadata contained in file systems. They brought in Dr. Jacob Goldberger, an expert in statistical modeling and machine learning, to help develop the algorithms that would provide the user-data link. In 2005, Faitelson, Goldberger, and Korkus filed a patent, “Automatic management of storage access control, which was granted in 2006. The result of their work was the Intelligent Data Use (IDU) classification platform, a platform for gathering and analyzing file data use. The first product based on this platform, DatAdvantage, was released in 2006 - built so that enterprises can monitor file activity and user behavior, and manage data ownership, data access rights, and responsibilities of file system data.
Varonis continued with core platform development. In 2009, Varonis added the IDU Classification Framework, which allowed Varonis products to search for keywords, phrases and patterns from file content. In 2013, Varonis released DatAlert to detect and uncover insider threats and potential data breaches, notifying and alerting on suspicious file system activity including unusual access to sensitive data and changes to permissions and configuration files.
Varonis raised capital from Accel Partners, Evergreen Venture Partners, Gitano Venture Capital, and EMC. On February 28, 2014 an initial public offering of Varonis stock raised about $106 million.
Technology and Architecture
The Varonis Metadata Framework is implemented at two levels. Non-intrusive monitoring resides on file servers, feeding both real-time file event information and ACLs to a separate server. The collected data is stored in a database. The second part, the IDU analytics engine, performs statistical analysis to derive data owners, baseline user activity, and user groupings. The Metadata Framework is able to incrementally index file metadata, thereby allowing it to efficiently maintain the current state of file metadata in its database. DatAdvantage presents this information to IT administrators. As of April 30, 2016, Varonis had 28 issued patents in the United States and 43 pending U.S. patent applications.