Transcript
AI is, of course, fueled by data. And security is a team sport, and there's a lot of data out there. And so with that, really exciting to have Rob Sobers from Varonis, Chief Marketing Officer, here with us. It's a commitment, in some sense, to kind of extend what Purview does across a lot more data. So I'd love to kind of talk to Rob about that and get his thoughts on this. Welcome, Rob. Oh, thank you for having me, Rudy. I'm really happy to be here. I'm excited to be here at Ignite as a Vanguard sponsor. So for those of you who don't know Varonis, we're the leader in data security, and we're a top 40 global Microsoft partner. We've partnered for many, many years. And I think one of the big turning points in our partnership was the cloud era, right? With M365, Azure, Entra ID, and teaming up with Purview and integrating quite well to make sure that our customers' data is safe from data breaches, that they can now deploy AI safely and do it in a very automated way. And I think we have north of 1,000 E5 and Varonis installations out there. When we're together, it's really a force multiplier. And our customers have the assurance that their data is protected, not only in the Microsoft ecosystem, but as Tala just mentioned, beyond. So I'm really excited to be partnering with y'all to bring in third-party signals into Purview. Yeah, can you share a little bit more, Rob? I'm sure the audience would want to know, how has the partnership evolved over the years? And how do you kind of see that, especially with AI, as you were starting to frame up their changing? Yeah, obviously with AI, it is a data security problem. And AI is built by design to consume all of the data in its pathway, right? If you have co-pilot deployed, it's using the user's pass-through permissions, right? If you have an agent, the agent is more valuable as it can consume more data, but you have to have the right controls to make sure it's only the right data, that if it's regulated data, that you know about it, and that all of the activity is being monitored so you can tell if there's anything malicious or out of policy going on. And that's really what we're doing with Varonis for co-pilot, and Varonis for chat GPT and other AI systems, is making sure that only the right data gets in the right hands, because this is a robot versus robot battle, right? Humans can't see and manage this risk. And data is messy, and it's all over the place, and there's a lot there. So, building off that, data doesn't just live in the Microsoft environment, like I was saying, it's messy. Do you wanna talk about the integration with Purview and why it matters to organizations that are trying to protect the data across these messiest states, across the entire ecosystem? Yeah, I mean, data security, as you know, it's about coverage, it's about scale, and it's about depth, right? Not all of your data's gonna live in M365. Some of it may still be on-prem, it's gonna be in Snowflake, and Databricks, and AWS. And we've been- And you were telling me last night, or the day before yesterday, that 60% of the data you encounter is still on-prem. There's a lot, and in some organizations, especially highly regulated ones, but you don't know what you're gonna get. You know, a customer may have data in places that you don't expect. And it's been our mission to support customers' data wherever it lives, and we've invested a lot of energy into building these connectors, and doing the depth as well. It's not enough to just discover the sensitive data. You have to know whether it's at risk, whether that means a misconfiguration, over-permissions, and then monitoring the actual activity, every read, move, open, modify, delete, so that you can, one, have a really detailed forensic audit trail, but two, be able to trigger alerts on abnormal behavior. And so, now with this integration, you can leverage the power of Varonis and this massive coverage inside of Purview. And you were talking a little bit about the data sources outside the Microsoft Cloud that you cover, where this sort of really, you know, peanut butter and jelly starts to come together. Yeah, I mean, you saw Salesforce on the screen, and the thing about each of these data sources is they all have their own permissions model. They all have their own format for event logging, and the risks are unique, you know? Salesforce has had its own attacks that are specific to it, and Snowflake has its risk model, and so these are the things that we've taken the time to really understand and bring those now. You build expertise over many years, I'm sure. Yes, 100%. Every data store is unique, but the goal is the same, right? The outcomes that the customer want is the same no matter whether we're talking about Salesforce or 365. It's no breaches, no fines, and to be able to plug in AI and be sure that it's only doing what you want it to do and nothing else. So we were talking backstage, you know, we're just getting going here together. Varonis and Microsoft are looking ahead. What opportunities do you see for us, and what does the phrase, you know, securing the world's data really mean to you in practice? Yeah, well, before we talk about what's ahead, I just wanted to mention, you know, we have managed data detection and response, which is a managed service. We deal with security incidents related to data, and it's worked really well, and part of that is we ingest Defender for endpoint alerts, right? So we know what's going on in the endpoint and on the data source, whether it's 365 or, yeah, or any of these data sources. So that's been a really popular integration, and we can also send our alerts into Sentinel. So we do have a lot of synergies along with Purview and labeling and other things that we've talked about here today. So I'm really excited to see where we're going. You know, we're probably the last generation to manage an all-human workforce, and because of what we just discussed and AI wanting to ingest data, this partnership is never gonna be, it's never been more important than it is now, and we appreciate it. Very cool, very cool. Well, Rob, I just wanna say thank you to you and the Varonis team. I think it's been interesting to start to kind of bring this partnership to life, and, you know, it'll be exciting to see what we do in this gigantic world. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you.
