We’ve been asked several times in recent weeks about the Acaveo vs Varonis comparison.  The question is best answered at a high-level since the two companies’ solutions are more adjacent, rather than competitive, to each other.

Varonis is widely recognized for its unique ability to assist organizations with analyzing data-level access and enabling end-users to manage permissions.  Many of the Varonis products involve activity intelligence, acquired through the deployment of auditing agents, providing insight into things like: who is using what data, who deleted a particular folder or item, what permissions are not being used, etc.  There are many unique capabilities derived from Varonis’ activity intelligence investment and if a security or compliance tool for file server access auditing and management is important to you then you should indeed look to Varonis.

At Acaveo, our software provides value at uncovering hidden risks and opportunities in unstructured data volumes where companies’ storage environments are very large, distributed and possibly hybrid.  This includes the ability to manipulate and manage data assets based on advanced rules to realize a desired benefit or outcome (i.e. data classification, migration to the cloud, defensible deletion, eDiscovery collection, etc.).  We’ve identified an unmet need in the marketplace for enterprise software that is efficient and easy to use at scale for the purposes of gaining visibility into, and control over, unstructured data.  Our strict adherence to an agentless approach means we don’t venture into activity intelligence and the use cases that that level of insight serves; however, it does mean that our software is better tuned to deliver high-value in short time frames using a small footprint approach that doesn’t impact end-users or require large investment to deploy and adopt.

Another attribute of Acaveo’s agentless approach is that it provides feature parity between on-premises and cloud data sources, so if you’re embracing Office 365 or your employees are storing data in places like Box or OneDrive for Business then Acaveo will give you visibility into data ownership, access rights and a variety of data characteristics centrally across these cloud repositories and your on-premises file shares, SharePoint Server, email, etc.  Deploying an agent to generate user activity logs on data stored in cloud services isn’t an option.

Finally, with Acaveo it is one license, one price for all that our software provides.  We keep it simple and predictable and avoid charging by product module, data source connectors, etc.

In late September, Gartner released their Market Guide for File Analysis Software.  The report lists Acaveo, Varonis and a number of other vendors under this exciting File Analysis product category.  As a newer product category, a wide variance in product capabilities can be expected amongst the vendors, as each vendor has a slightly different background in how they entered the problem space and a different vision for where they see it going.  The core problem we all recognize is the need to have an understanding and some levels of control of corporate, employee-generated, unstructured data.  The technology for how you get there, and the use cases that are important for you to address, will determine which product(s) are the best fit.

Geoff Bourgeois is Chief Technology Officer at Acaveo