Nottingham Building Society improves security with data ownership system

The Nottingham Building Society has been able to "identify and assign ownership" for over 90 percent of its information

Nottingham Building Society has made a move to make its critical and sensitive data more secure.

The Nottingham Building Society has been able to "identify and assign ownership" for over 90 percent of its information with DatAdvantage software from Varonis.

In turn it has moved on-going management responsibility to these owners, giving them the ability to easily maintain permissions for their areas with Varonis DataPrivilege software.

Ken Johnson, senior IT security analyst at Nottingham Building Society, said: "Knowing who can access what data is the biggest challenge and practically impossible to do manually. Before we started this project we could count the number of assigned data owners on one hand. Permissions were managed manually using spreadsheets and we knew it had to be better."

Nottingham started using the new system with a relatively easy installation on a test server first, letting DatAdvantage run and monitoring progress for about ten days. "When we came back and looked at the results they were very impressive. We could immediately see where our sensitive data was and who was accessing it," said Johnson.

Data owners use DataPrivilege's self-service portal to perform entitlement reviews. Users are able to start handling permissions and entitlement reviews direct within its interface with minimal IT involvement or support.

Johnson said: "Everyone right up to the CEO is performing entitlement reviews using DataPrivilege on a quarterly basis. Data security has been tightened and it has freed up IT so it can focus efforts on other areas of the infrastructure."

Last year Nottingham Building Society brought a data backup upgrade forward in response to highly publicised data security failures in the high street banking industry, such as the IT glitches at RBS.

The building society had slated the upgrade from tape to disk for this year, but brought the migration, from LTO3 tape back-up to a disk-based system from Symantec, forward by around 12 months.

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