Likewise Data Analytics and Governance

Unstructured data is growing faster than all other types of data and will increase by 800 percent during the next five years. Analysts are referring to it as the big-data explosion.

But big data brings new challenges. Because 40 percent of it typically contains sensitive information, compliance regulations or internal policies mandate security. At the same time, workers depend on easy, rapid access to do their job. Security, then, must be balanced with availability. Easier said than done. Data silos, access barriers, different protocols, security gaps, and a lack of control stand firmly in the way, increasing risks and costs.

Likewise Data Analytics and Governance unites identity, security, and storage to overcome the challenges of managing unstructured data in a heterogeneous environment. Here's how:

Secures unstructured data with uniform policies
Analyzes access patterns, storage thresholds, and file change events
Governs data types, sensitivity levels, data owners, and entitlements
Audits patterns of access and usage to generate alerts and compliance reports

The application balances easy access with access control, while providing a powerful analytical framework to demonstrate compliance and reduce costs.

Executives can rest easy in the knowledge that unstructured data is both controlled for compliance and available for those who need it. IT managers, meanwhile, are empowered to track business-critical data, manage access controls, and create audit reports that prove compliance.

Key Features

Security

View users and groups from Microsoft Active Directory, LDAP, or NIS.
Consolidate management of entitlements across data silos by setting security policies for user and group access as well as the security descriptors of files, eliminating security gaps.
Proactively remediate security settings from one location, the Likewise interface.

Auditing

Identify patterns of access to unstructured data.
Implement policy-driven exception-based monitoring with dashboards and real-time event alerts over email or SNMP.
Generate reports that demonstrate compliance with evidence. There are reports for HIPAA, ITAR, PCI DSS, Sarbanes-Oxley, GLBA, and FISMA.
Show chain of custody for data on user access.

Governance

Empower data owners to manage entitlements.
Classify data as sensitive when it falls under legal or regulatory requirements and then track it through its life cycle.
Establish a central repository for change management of security and configuration policies.

Data Analytics

Improve management of unstructured data and reduce costs by using analytics to streamline data operations and storage systems.
Quickly identify problem areas with customizable dashboards that can show both real-time and historical reports.
Visualize contextual information on users and groups, file security settings, data sensitivity, and access patterns to improve data management, utilization, and service-level agreements.
Identify overutilization of valuable NAS resources and identify users or applications that are causing a NAS controller to reach its write-pending limit.

For a full list of features, see the datasheet.

Benefits

Taken together, the features of Likewise Data Analytics and Governance let you consolidate user access across data silos, enforce consistent access policies, and manage entitlements from a single point. Benefits:

Mitigate risk
Get a hierarchical view of a global environment
Increase productivity through visibility
Identify root causes of security, performance, and access issues
Reduce IT management costs

Architecture

Built as a big data solution, delivered as a virtual appliance and deployed as a private cloud, Likewise Data Analytics and Governance offers significant advantages over traditional approaches in terms of scale, performance, security, and cost.

The tremendous amount of metadata requires a solution that can scale. Our commercially hardened SQL and NoSQL infrastructure with polyglot persistence is the only solution on the market today that can scale beyond a departmental deployment. It is designed to support storage arrays with hundreds of millions of file objects and high workloads.

In addition, it uses low-cost commodity hardware that scales out rather than scales up as your requirements expand. It accepts events and log data from NetApp and EMC NAS devices, and can be extended to accept other data through a predefined RESTful API.