LOS ALTOS, Calif., Oct. 28, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- vArmour, the leading provider of Application Relationship Management, and Okera, the leader in secure data access and management at scale, announced today, a global strategic partnership to provide the first end-to-end solution for securing user access to critical applications and data, regardless of where the assets reside in the enterprise. With this new partnership, vArmour and Okera enable joint customers to reduce risk by understanding when users are accessing critical business applications and data across complex environments brought on by the highly distributed nature of today’s workforce.
Research shows that 80 percent of breaches involve compromised or weak credentials, and on average, take 206 days to identify. Even when proper identity access controls are in place, complex application relationships create hidden pathways between unauthorized users and data systems, making it difficult to quickly address security incidents, identify the blast radius, who and what devices may be involved, and contain it before a breach occurs.
The partnership solves this challenge. vArmour’s new Application Access & Identity Module understands every user access relationship to every application, across every environment, while Okera’s Spotlight performs deep data discovery, and effectively ‘spotlights’ which applications are housing sensitive data. Together, the joint solution provides unprecedented control and visibility over risky user access to critical data all across the enterprise.
“Understanding who is accessing sensitive data, at all times, is a massive problem in the enterprise,” said Kate Kuehn, Senior Vice President, vArmour. “Our strategic partnership with Okera integrates the locations of sensitive data with vArmour’s relationship-based view of all users, devices, and applications, enabling organizations to understand their risk exposure at a level never seen before. We couldn’t be more excited about our partnership with Okera and the value we’re providing for joint customers.”
“The combination of vArmour and Okera provides a level of insight not previously seen,” said David Fairman, former CSO of NAB. “This is the first time the relationship between the user, application, and data have come together to give us the last mile in security, risk, and compliance.”
“Exposing suspicious access to applications while identifying forgotten or unknown copies of data can mitigate serious risk while enabling full compliance with emerging data privacy regulations,” says Nong Li, CTO and co-founder of Okera. “At one customer, Okera Spotlight was able to identify 500,000 rogue datasets on Amazon S3 with duplicates and PII in less than an hour. Our customer was able to save millions of dollars in AWS fees and data engineering costs, and potentially more than that on GDPR and other regulatory exposure fines.“
"Protecting applications and data from compromise is absolutely a mission-critical business priority,” said Kate Teitler, Senior analyst, TAG Cyber. “The best way to do that is by closely governing who or what is permitted access through the least privilege and identity-based controls."
The vArmour and Okera partnership enables the following use cases around secure user access to data:
- Fully visualize application, user, and data relationships: Find out who is accessing what sensitive data and when. Determine the type of data an application has access to and if the data is sensitive, provide a data-first approach to security.
- Identify Suspicious or Malicious Actors: Identifying application access by accounts (whether incorrect usage or stolen) or patterns (e.g. location) that access new or out-of-policy systems.
- Data First Approach to Security: Drill down to see beyond applications and their connections right into specific, sensitive data attributes being accessed.
- Audit and Compliance Automation: Automated documentation and enforcement of compliance requirements that govern application access.
- Identify Toxic Combinations: Visualize and control toxic application access combinations for improved governance and compliance (e.g. Ttading users accessing research applications; non- privileged users accessing privileged systems).
About vArmour
vArmour is the leading provider of Application Relationship Management. Enterprises around the world rely on vArmour to control operational risk, increase application resiliency and secure hybrid clouds — all while leveraging the technology they already own without adding costly new agents or infrastructure. Based in Los Altos, CA, the company was founded in 2011 and is backed by top investors including Highland Capital Partners, AllegisCyber, Redline Capital, Citi Ventures, and Telstra. Learn more at www.varmour.com.
About Okera
Okera enables the management of data access and governance at scale for today’s modern cloud data lakes. Built on the belief that companies can do more with their data, Okera’s Active Data Access Platform (ODAP) enables scalable fine-grained data protection and visibility on data lakes for both structured and unstructured data. This allows agility and governance to co-exist and gives data consumers, owners and stewards the confidence to unlock the power of their data for innovation and growth. Enterprise organizations receive immediate value from Okera, which can be implemented and deployed in less than a day. Okera is headquartered in San Francisco and is backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, ClearSky Security Fund, Felicis Ventures, and Capital One Growth Ventures. Learn more at www.okera.com or contact us at info@okera.com.
Media Contact:
Mariah Gauthier, Highwire PR
vArmour@highwirepr.com
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