Israel Innovation 2.0

Last month, Varonis Systems Inc., a data governance solutions provider, was selected as a “Cool Vendor” in the March 2009 “Cool Vendors in Risk Management and Compliance, 2009” report by research company, Gartner Inc. 

According to Varonis’ announcement, 

“Varonis’ Data Governance Suite provides IT administrators and data owners with the intelligence they need to control access to valuable business data by enabling complete visibility to all file and folder access. The software automatically builds permissions management workflow policies by generating recommendations about whose access to company data should be revoked or allowed, empowering data owners to sign off on access rights to their files and mitigate the risks of data misuse. Varonis allows organizations to ensure that data is only being accessed by those with business need – something that proves to be critical as companies increasingly seek data protection to prevent insider breaches or data loss.”

The news from earlier today about the MySpace data breach is a good reminder of how important and necessary data governance solutions such as what’s offered Varonis and other companies still are. 

Company Facts

Founded in 2005.

R&D office in Herzliyya, Israel.

Yaki Faitelson, CEO and Co-Founder.

Ohad Korkus, VP of Engineering, CTO and Co-Founder.

Products: Varonis Data Governance Suite (Varonis DatAdvantage and Varonis DataPrivilege).

Website: www.varonis.com

Customers: Large financial institutions, health care services organizations as well as leading energy, technology and manufacturing firms. Specific customers include, DSM, CondeNast Publications, MoMA and SanDisk.

While attending a VC Cafe meetup in Tel Aviv last week, I had the opportunity to meet Henry Broodney, co-founder and COO of the Israel-based business continuity software company, InGrid Networks. The company’s data protection suite provides small businesses with solutions for backup and recovery and disaster recovery for desktops, laptops and servers by “leveraging existing networked resources to create a private storage cloud that integrates with a public cloud for off-site disaster protection.”   

In this video taken at the meetup, Broodney gives a brief overview of the company.

Benefits of the technology include, seamless operation, low cost of ownership and ease of use.

Earlier this month, Jon Brodkin of Network World named Axxana to his list, “10 start-ups to watch in ’09“. Today, he included the enterprise storage company as one of five vendors who are pushing flash technology for the enterprise in “How flash is changing storage…”

In October 2008, Axxana exited stealth mode at the Storage Networking World conference to introduce its enterprise data recorder, which is similar in idea and design to an aviation black box. Amidst a crowded database storage and recovery market, Axxana’s innovative technology promises no data loss, unlimited distance and cost effectiveness. 

According to Axxana’s website, 

“EDR (enterprise data recording) combines aviation Flight Data Recorder (Black Box) expertise with newly developed technologies to address today’s most pressing data protection challenges – data loss, distance between primary and EDR data centers and cost.

The Axxana Phoenix System (Black Box) is located near the storage system at the primary data center and records a synchronous data stream from the storage. At the same time, an asynchronous data replication system is moving data to a secondary data center (the remote recovery site). The Phoenix Black Box has to protect only the Gigabytes of data that would have been lost in a typical asynchronous replication scenario. Data is protected inside the Black Box during the course of the disaster and can be immediately extracted.”

Data extraction in an emergency is achieved either by:

* Physically locating the system by tracking the homing signal and connecting a laptop with an Axxana software component to the Phoenix System™ at the disaster site, or
* The self sufficient and well protected system transferring the data to the secondary site using highly resilient cellular broadband technology.

The technology is the first to achieve all of the following:

* Zero post-disaster data loss (RPO=0, as with synchronous replication)
* Unlimited distance to DR data center (as with asynchronous replication)
* Quick data recovery (very short RTO)
* Significant operational-cost reductions for data protection by enabling the use of existing data center assets, and low-cost commodity communication lines

According to Brodkin, the Phoenix System is currently in Beta and will be available at the end of the first quarter. With a cost in the six-figure range, the Phoenix will appeal most to customers in the financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and government industries.

Since Israel began its operation in Gaza a week ago, over 300 sites have fallen victim to cyberattacks. Large Israeli company sites, such as Israel Discount Bank, Ynetnews and Israel’s largest domain registration site along with small Jewish community sites, including several religious ones in the US have been targeted. The main group behind several of these attacks, though far from the only one, is the infamous Moroccan group, TeamEvil, which also hacked some of the 750-plus Israeli websites before and during the Lebanon war in 2006.

Security analysts predict that American company websites will also be attacked in the next few weeks. For an article on the topic that appeared in SC Magazine last week, Dan Kaplan interviewed Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and John Kindervag, a senior analyst with Forrester Research who both made suggestions for preventing cyberattacks:

“Warner said website operators must secure common entryways for hackers, including vulnerable programming language, forum or blog software, image programs and utilities, such as website statistic applications. In addition, they must prevent the theft of FTP credentials, which are used to access sites and load content.

John Kindervag, a senior analyst with Forrester Research, said most websites are not built with security in mind. As a result, site owners should conduct a vulnerability assessment and, if they need immediate action, install a web application firewall, which can detect anomalous behavior.”

For more on the topic and to make sure your secure, you can check out the following sites:

10 Ways to Prevent Cyberterrorism

International Cooperation Needed To Prevent Cyberterrorism

Cyber Terrorism Threat Increasing – How To Prevent A Digital 9/11

Actimize, a transactional risk management software company under NICE Systems, announced last week that it has embedded IBM’s InfoSphere Global Name Recognition (GNR) technology within the Actimize enterprise risk management platform “to enhance its analytical capabilities.”

According to the announcement,

GNR is an enterprise tool designed to help organizations understand, analyze and process multi-cultural names to provide name processing and matching capabilities for mission critical and corporate wide applications… [that] will help Actimize’s sophisticated analytical models focus more closely on the names of different customers, citizens, criminals and other individuals by examining and comparing them to different known names of good and bad entities.

Actimize’s risk management platform will mainly function by analyzing name order, multiple titles or prefixes, cultural spelling variations, possible transposition errors. Upon identifying a match when a transaction is made, the Actimize solution is able to then determine whether to approve, block or forward it.

Company Facts

Founded in 1999.

Headquartered in New York. R&D in Petach Tikva, Israel.

David Sosna, Co-Founder and CEO.

David Govrin, Co-Founder & General Manager, Israel.

Boaz Pe’er, Co-Founder & CTO.

Technology: Actimize risk management platform.

Website: www.actimize.com.

Major IT media sources seem to be missing this, Firewall Operations and Security Risk Management solutions provider, AlgoSec Inc., unveiled its new AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer (AFA) product suite today.

The new suite, which improves the overall security and efficiency of enterprise firewalls, is built on three distinct software modules, each focused on addressing a specific set of technical requirements within the enterprise: Firewall Operations Management, Policy Optimization and Risk Management.

Customers will be able to purchase combinations of these modules in four pre-bundled license editions according to their specific needs. The four new editions of the AFA Product Suite are: the AFA Operations Management Edition, the AFA Optimization Edition, the AFA Risk Management Edition and the AFA Enterprise Edition.

The suite also now includes new features for automated PCI and SOX compliance reports plus Intelligent Rule Re-Ordering recommendations for improved firewall performance.

Company Facts

Founded in 2003.

Yuval Baron, CEO and Co-Founder.

Avishai Wool, CTO and Co-Founder.

Product: AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer (AFA)

Website: www.AlgoSec.com