Varonis Acquires Cyral to Reinvent Database Activity Monitoring

Today marks another exciting milestone in Varonis’ relentless pursuit to protect the world’s data wherever it lives. We are expanding our Data Security Platform to include next-generation Database Activity Monitoring (DAM), with the acquisition of Cyral.

By combining Cyral’s cloud-native DAM with Varonis’ robust and growing database security capabilities, customers can begin to upgrade their costly legacy solutions and shatter the silos that have traditionally separated structured and unstructured data security. 

Cyral’s innovative approach to DAM uses agentless and stateless interception technology that deploys quickly and overcomes the challenges legacy vendors face in preventing data breaches and ensuring compliance. 

Cyral’s CEO Manav Mital and his world-class team bring decades of database security expertise, making them a perfect fit for Varonis. This acquisition highlights yet another way Varonis is redefining modern, AI-powered data security.

A structured data explosion fueled by cloud and AI 

The meteoric rise of the data cloud, driven by giants like Databricks and Snowflake, has unlocked virtually unlimited capacity and frictionless access to databases, data lakes, and data pipelines. Meanwhile, vector databases, the foundation of AI model training and processing, are challenging security teams with unprecedented scale, volume, and complexity. 

Between production, development, and test instances, many organizations struggle to secure tens of thousands of managed, unmanaged, and on-prem databases that store their most critical PII, intellectual property, and AI training data. 

Legacy DAM is dead 

For over two decades, regulatory compliance has driven DAM projects.

Despite the growing need and desire to monitor and protect their databases, very few organizations would go through the pain of implementing a complex and costly DAM solution if they weren’t mandated. 

Lack of competition and complex barriers to entry have stifled innovation. Modern security products in competitive markets had to overcome many of the challenges below that DAM vendors continue to ignore: 

• Massive footprint for little return. DAM technologies today lack a modern cloud architecture that supports cloud and on-premises databases without requiring self-managed appliances, manual configuration, and cumbersome host-based agents that require constant support and maintenance.  
• No automation, no outcomes. Like a box of Lego with no instructions, DAM technologies collect vast amounts of data but fail to help customers automatically detect and respond to abnormal activity, enforce policies, or revoke excessive access. 
• Functionality lives in a silo. DAM solutions live in isolation, with narrow functionality, little to no integration with other data security tools. 

Most DAM deployments never finish as promised. Instead, customers reduce their project scope to fit DAM limitations and complexity leaving critical databases exposed and unmonitored.  

The AI era demands a new and novel approach to database security. 

A unified Data Security Platform 

The days of fragmented data security products are ending. Varonis protects all your data, at rest or in motion, from a single unified platform. Every second, everywhere.

Since we first announced structured data support, customers have been delighted with our AI-powered classification, real-time posture management, automatic data masking, and admin event monitoring for databases in the cloud and on-prem.

Here are some of the advanced database security and compliance capabilities Cyral will bring to Varonis’ AI-powered Data Security Platform: 

• Agentless, context-rich activity monitoring. Get real-time database activity with zero performance impact across on-prem and cloud data sources. Activity is enriched with end-user identity and session context to detect anomalies and simplify audits. 
• Identity federation. Enable single sign-on and MFA across all databases using existing IDPs, eliminating the need for shared credentials.
• Fine-grained policy enforcement. Centralize just-in-time authorization policies, down to the row, column, or object level, using IAM roles and dynamic, attribute-based access. 
• User-to-data tracking. Resolve service account queries to the individual user behind the app or tool providing access to prevent abuse and provide more detailed auditing. 

Varonis’ ability to deliver a consolidated data security offering that drives automated outcomes at scale is what cemented our position as the leading data security company by a landslide.

With this acquisition, our goal is to leave no database security use case behind. It is a big step forward in our mission to deliver AI-powered data security for all data, everywhere. No breaches, no fines, no effort.