Varonis has confirmed that it has scored a contract working with the University of Liverpool to overcome the challenge of students moving sensitive data to personal cloud-based storage.
Using Varonis DatAnywhere, the university gives its 32,000 students and 4,700 staff the “flexibility” to sync its file share data across all of their devices with the added ability to securely share files with external collaborators.
It has proved popular with people – within eight days of rolling out the software, the university had 1,366 new DatAnywhere users.
Andy Williams, Systems Manager, University of Liverpool said that there were major headaches moving data online to file sharing services.
“In addition to the data being vulnerable offsite, concerns of document version control needed to be addressed, plus the complication that when people leave the university, it is virtually impossible to retain or even revoke access to data stored in uncontrolled repositories.”
It also means that with DatAnywhere in place, the university can now offer a viable alternative to Dropbox and has recently introduced a policy stating ‘confidential documents are not to be stored on other platforms.’
The software uses the university’s existing Active Directory permissions, and no one now has access to shared data, unless they already had it or are provisioned access.
“IT still retains control over who can and can’t access files, particularly those deemed confidential. We can also revoke access centrally, and it will replicate across everything at once, saving time and reducing complexity,” he said
