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Varonis Field CTO Brian Vecci sat down with StateTech to chat about enhancing digital integrity for state and local governments. Read the summary below or view the entire interview here.

Crowned the greatest productivity tool in the age of AI, Microsoft Copilot is a powerful asset for companies today.

Microsoft Copilot is now available for enterprise customers, transforming productivity in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. However, security and privacy concerns have companies hesitant to deploy Copilot. There are operational, regulatory, and reputational risks that every organization needs to overcome before they can leverage Copilot.

Sometimes when I speak with organizations about sensitive data risk, I hear things like, “All of our data is sensitive,” or “We’re sure PII is only in X system.” But it’s not what you know that might be your biggest problem — it’s always what you don’t know.

Permission propagation is when you set permissions – also called Access Control Lists (ACL) – on a folder or a drive, and the folder properties apply those permissions to all of the folders under that folder in the tree.

If you don’t need it, get rid of it. If it’s sensitive, make sure sure it’s in the right place, and only accessible to those who need it. Old files are expensive and risky, which is why we have retention and disposition policies for what should happen to data that we don’t need anymore.

(This one entry in a series of posts about the Varonis Operational Plan – a clear path to data governance. You can find the whole series here.)

Complexity is dangerous in the security world. The harder something is to understand, the harder it is to protect. SharePoint falls squarely into this category. Configuring permissions in SharePoint can be daunting, especially if you don’t understand the core concepts and terminology. Unfortunately, managing access controls in SharePoint is often left end-users, not IT administrators, and that can spell disaster.

SharePoint permissions can be the stuff of nightmares. At Varonis, we get a chance to meet with a lot of SharePoint administrators and it’s rare that they’re not exhausted trying to manage user permissions. SharePoint’s a useful collaboration platform—and Microsoft’s fastest selling product ever—but helping to ensure proper permissions and access control is probably not its strongest suit.

Wednesday, I spoke at ISSA’s monthly chapter meeting in Colorado Springs. Speaking at ISSA chapter events is great, because it’s always an intelligent crowd that quickly grasps issues around data governance.