Symantec Releases Data Insight 3.0 Governance Intelligence Platform

Symantec announced the release of Data Insight 3.0, the latest version of its technology designed to improve information governance by providing intelligence into ownership and use of unstructured data, such as documents, presentations, spreadsheets and emails.

The enhancements to Data Insight can help organisations transform storage operations and simplify information governance processes to reduce costs, eliminate risk and achieve compliance.

Reduction of storage costs

Data Insight’s data usage analytics of unstructured data, such as growth, frequency of access, inactive data and user activity, aid in reducing storage costs and streamlining unstructured data storage operations, such as reclamation, tiering, migration to cloud storage and capacity planning.

The company said Data Insight is designed to support large-scale data management operations with its highly scalable and parallel architecture. With optimisations in collection, indexing and query algorithms, Data Insight delivers actionable analytics with enhanced performance across large data sets.

The platform is also designed to help storage, security and compliance professionals empower the data owners inside the business to better manage and protect unstructured data through a new data custodian management feature, which helps automate the discovery and management of custodians for unstructured data within the business. IT can automatically engage the business owners or custodians with usage, permissions, and classification reporting and analytics.

Data Insight automates custodian reviews of inactive or orphan data facilitating storage remediation actions, such as deletion, archival or migration, as well as assisting with data retention guidelines based on data ownership classification. Data Insight’s ownership and usage capabilities help organisations build a consumption-based chargeback model to promote accountability for efficient use of the storage.

Symantec continues to strengthen the integration between Data Insight and Symantec Data Loss Prevention. Features such as risk scoring and sensitive data alerts, combine Data Loss Prevention’s content-awareness with Data Insight’s usage and permissions analysis to help prioritise remediation of data based on risk. Data Insight’s custodian management feature also streamlines the risk-remediation process.

Through Data Insight’s integration with the Aveksa Access Governance suite, organisations can establish business processes to control who can access key data resources across the enterprise. By incorporating the ownership and access information discovered by Symantec’s Data Insight into the Aveksa system, organisations can help achieve compliance and enforce access policies.

In addition, Data Insight 3.0 now features a new integration point with Veritas Storage Foundation 6.0. Customers using Storage Foundation for file serving can now use Data Insight for their data management needs. Data Insight also features enhanced operations for NetApp network-attached storage (NAS) and expanded coverage to support both Common Internet File System (CIFS) and Network File System (NFS) protocols.

Data Insight provides support for platforms such as NetApp NAS, EMC NAS, Windows File Servers, Microsoft SharePoint, and Unix File Servers with Veritas Storage Foundation file system. The platform also provides support for a range of directory services, such as Microsoft Active Directory, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and Network Information Service (NIS/NIS+).