How Saia Reduced Costs, Improved Security, and Migrated to the Cloud
"We had over twenty years of legacy data that we had just been holding on to and didn't ever really manage the permissions, didn't know who had access to what."
Julia Bruce
Identity and Data Governance Manager
Saia had accumulated more than two decades of legacy data on its on-premises file servers, with permissions that had never really been managed and no clear picture of who had access to what. For Julia Bruce, Identity and Data Governance Manager, a planned migration to SharePoint Online and OneDrive presented a rare opportunity to finally clean house.
CHALLENGE
Two Decades of Data Snowballing With No Oversight
Years of unmanaged growth left Saia with a mountain of legacy data and no visibility into its sensitivity, its usage, or who could access it. Before migrating that data to the cloud, Bruce's team needed a way to review it all and decide what was actually worth keeping.
SOLUTION
Visibility Into Sensitive Data, Access, and Usage
Varonis gave Saia visibility into exactly where its sensitive data lived, who had access to it, who wasn't using it, and concrete recommendations for what to do with it. That visibility was only as good as the accuracy behind it — and Bruce found the Data Classification Engine's out-of-the-box accuracy stood apart from other tools she'd used.
With a lot of other tools, there's gonna be a ton of time that you'll invest tuning it to make sure that a Social Security number is really a Social Security number. But with Varonis, you don't have to do that. Out of the box, Data Classification Engine is very accurate.
That accuracy let Bruce partner directly with business stakeholders, reviewing exposure together in real time within Varonis rather than working from static reports after the fact.
RESULTS
Tens of Millions Fewer Sensitive Data Hits
Working directly with the business, Bruce's team was able to reduce sensitive data exposure by roughly thirty million hits — a reduction she describes as a huge win achieved with surprising ease.
"We're reviewing it in real time in Varonis, where we've been able to reduce our exposure of hits of sensitive data for around thirty million hits, which is huge. That's a big win. It's really been easy to do with Varonis."
Beyond the numbers, the visibility Varonis provided has empowered the business itself to make informed decisions about its own data — turning a decades-old cleanup problem into an ongoing, collaborative governance process.
