IT Management

The Top 9 File Analysis Software

Assess the top File Analysis Software known for its content classification, metadata extraction, and data governance features designed to enhance data management and security within organizations.

The Top 9 File Analysis Software includes:
  • 1. BetterCloud
  • 2. Check Point DLP
  • 3. CrowdStrike Falcon Sandbox
  • 4. Egnyte Data Security And Governance
  • 5. Fortra Data Classification
  • 6. Netwrix Data Classification
  • 7. Palo Alto Networks Wildfire
  • 8. Varonis
  • 9. VirusTotal

File analysis software allows organizations to enhance data management through advanced categorization, classification, and analytics. This type of software can accurately determine the location, security, usage, and redundancy of data across a vast range of file types. Subsequent analysis can provide crucial insights regarding data usage patterns, anomalies, compliance vulnerabilities, and opportunities for efficiency optimization.

File analysis software is commonly utilized by IT administrators, data governance committees, and data operations teams to track and manage digital assets, ensure regulatory compliance, carry out data clean-up operations, and aid in the migration of data to new systems or platforms. As part of a comprehensive data management strategy, file analysis tools can support efforts to streamline data processing and storage, safeguard sensitive information, and identify areas for cost reduction. 

As data is rapidly increasing in volume, the role of file analysis software has become more important, resulting in a highly competitive market. This guide will aim to aid in the selection process by evaluating the top file analysis software providers based on their offerings, customer feedback, and our own technical assessment.

BetterCloud Logo

BetterCloud is a unified SaaS management software that is designed for diverse IT teams managing multi-SaaS environments. This solution delivers automation of onboarding and offboarding, mid-lifecycle transitions, alongside SaaS application access and entitlements, and security policies.

BetterCloud provides granular controls that ensure automated safeguarding against the exposure and transfer of sensitive company data. The software comes equipped with effortless risk identification, allowing you to run your documents against a variety of preset and tailor-made data types, while triggering alerts for any unwanted and unauthorized file access or exposure. BetterCloud also offers proactive policy enforcement and integrates automation to secure and uphold a consistent file security protocol across your workspace. This solution aims to forewarn and avoid improper data display and unauthorized document access.

Another useful feature offered by BetterCloud is their agile threat remediation. This is facilitated by automated workflows that block file access and secure files in response to instances of sensitive data falling prey to unauthorized inside or outside users. This tool ensures data protection and maintains compliance, forming an essential part of an effective data handling strategy.

BetterCloud Logo
Check Point Logo

Check Point is a global provider specializing in IT security products. Their Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solution, integrated into Check Point Next Generation Firewalls (NGFW), is designed to proactively safeguard businesses from unintentional data loss while ensuring compliance with industry standards and regulations.

Check Point DLP effectively tracks and controls the movement of any type of sensitive information, including emails, browsing history, and files shared across services. The product features preemptive data loss prevention, which instructs and alerts end-users on appropriate data handling processes in real-time, without involving IT or security teams. Check Point DLP is simple to deploy and manage across the entire IT infrastructure from a single console and allows businesses to select from over 60+ content awareness or 500+ DLP predefined data types, or create custom data types based on file attributes, keywords, RegEx patterns or a mix of these elements. It also offers data fingerprinting and document matching based on corporate templates.

The platform’s integration with SmartEvent allows for comprehensive visibility and reporting, ensuring that Check Point’s Data Loss Prevention customers can effectively monitor and detect data loss incidents. This solution is designed to equip businesses with a streamlined tool for preventing unintentional data loss and enhancing data security operations.

Check Point Logo
Crowdstrike Logo

CrowdStrike Falcon Sandbox is a cybersecurity technology product developed by CrowdStrike is an American company that specializes in cloud workload, endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services. The product is designed to perform deep analysis on evasive and unknown threats, thereby strengthening security defenses.

Falcon Sandbox’s unique hybrid analysis technology allows for detection of unknown and zero-day exploits, even in the face of evasive malware. This technology provides a comprehensive view of all file, network, memory and process activity, revealing the full attack lifecycle and providing in-depth insights. This depth of analysis is vital for effectively dealing with evasive and advanced malware threats. In addition to threat analysis, Falcon Sandbox delivers actionable indicators of compromise (IOCs), essential for the quick and effective response from security teams. These easily-digestible reports streamline the process, allowing all security teams to operate more effectively and react faster to threats.

With Falcon Sandbox, cybersecurity teams gain valuable insight into both the specific malware attacks they face, and the larger campaigns potentially linked to them. The tool is quick and simple to implement, with no need for costly infrastructure or set-up. The product ultimately serves to bolster the effectiveness of a company’s entire security infrastructure.

Crowdstrike Logo
Egnyte Logo

Egnyte is a software provider that offers cloud-based tools for content security, compliance, and collaboration for businesses, providing tools that facilitate secure collaboration between team members and external parties. Egnyte Data Security and Governance is designed to discover and protect sensitive data, thereby reducing risk exposure while helping to maintain compliance.

This software automatically identifies, classifies, and continuously monitors sensitive data across various cloud and on-premises sources, eliminating the need for manual oversight. The tool’s sophisticated platform includes out-of-the-box classification patterns and a centralized control dashboard, as well as ransomware risk mitigation. The system can protect business content from ransomware attacks with both signature and behavior-based detection methods. It can also report compromised users, files, and data subjects. It allows automated data recovery with file snapshots and provides multi-cloud data management capabilities, such as automating content lifecycle workflows.

The Egnyte platform offers protection against data leaks, with sharing safeguards and granular permissions that can prevent unauthorized file access. It also provides proactive detection and alerts for suspicious logins and other potential anomalies in user and file behavior. These extensive features support businesses in their endeavor to maintain robust content and data security, while also facilitating smooth collaboration and compliance.

Egnyte Logo
Fortra

Fortra’s Data Classification Solutions are designed to identify, classify, and secure unstructured data. These flexible solutions establish a policy-driven foundation that aids in the identification and classification of sensitive data, whether it’s newly created, in transit, or at rest. This allows the application of an appropriate security policy to ensure its protection.

Fortra provides data classification, identification, and security automation. With data classification, users can ensure their security measures adequately safeguard their sensitive information within corporate firewalls and cloud systems. Data identification offers the capability to scan and analyze data at various stages whilst applying appropriate identification attributes. Security automation allows for more accurate and effective data security decisions by adding context to data. Fortra also maintains compliance with multiple regulations including GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, ITAR, and POPIA. It also offers data retention and archiving capabilities. Monitoring and reporting capabilities are also included, providing greater understanding of user behavior and demonstrating return on investment from the solution.

Fortra’s Data Classification Solutions aid in protecting business-critical data, improving data control, reducing risk, and, ultimately, enhancing business performance. By integrating with potent data security and governance ecosystems, these solutions simultaneously provide an improved and streamlined business performance.

Fortra

Netwrix is a private IT security software firm that produces a range of software solutions aimed at identifying secure critical data and aiding in compliance auditing. Their solution, Netwrix Data Classification, is designed specifically for organizations looking to effectively classify and manage sensitive data across their operations.

Netwrix Data Classification stands out for its high-fidelity data classification feature, ensuring accurate categorization of sensitive data by employing compound term processing and statistical analysis technology rather than simple keyword or Regex matching. The software also offers predefined classification rules, allowing swift deployment and identification of data protected by regulations such as GDPR, PCI DSS, and HIPAA. Custom rules can also be created to identify additional data elements relevant to individual organizations, while the dedicated DSAR search engine reduces the labor and expense associated with the management of Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) processes. This solution allows compliance administrators to efficiently handle searches and offers automated risk remediation measures.

Netwrix Data Classification provides benefits such as accurate data tagging that integrates classification information into the files. It also minimizes risks and costs associated with unnecessary data storage by precisely identifying outdated records or duplicates that can be securely archived or removed, thereby optimizing data storage protocols.

Palo Alto Logo

Palo Alto Networks, a renowned American multinational cybersecurity firm, offers a cloud-based malware protection engine – WildFire – that enables auto-prevention of unidentified malware variants inline. It offers robust security without compromising on operational productivity, ensuring organizational protection.

By utilizing the industry’s most extensive threat intelligence and malware prevention engine, WildFire guarantees efficient file protection and provides fast security updates. Its real-time prevention capability allows for quick threat neutralization, effectively halting rapidly evolving malware such as ransomware. WildFire offers a global reach, catering to strict data residency and compliance needs, and can function as a public service or be delivered in hybrid and air-gapped environments. This broad coverage, paired with cloud-based architecture, ensures rapid protection across all network, endpoint, and cloud locations. WildFire also employs machine learning, dynamic and static analysis, and a custom-built analysis environment that effectively discovers sophisticated threats across various stages and attack vectors.

Implementing WildFire offers a considerable improvement in security capabilities, with updates distributed 60 times faster than other sandbox solutions due to its purpose-built infrastructure. This results in a holistic protection system that adds significant value to an organization’s cybersecurity efforts.

Palo Alto Logo
Varonis Logo

Varonis Systems is a software company known for developing a security platform that caters specifically to the need for managing and protecting unstructured data. The software carries out User Behaviour Analytics (UBA) with the objective of identifying unusual patterns that could indicate a cyberattack.

Varonis’ software provides Data Discovery and Classification, which works to automatically locate, classify, label, and secure sensitive data across on-premise and cloud data stores. The software can scan structured databases and data warehouses, as well as unstructured data stored in files, folders, and cloud-based buckets. Data in semi-structured formats – like in SaaS applications or emails – can also be scanned effectively. Aiding in the removal of obsolete sensitive data, the software also has built-in mechanisms for alerting and monitoring any suspicious activities, while also enforcing label and DLP policies automatically, correcting missing or incorrect labels, and carrying out essential procedures like encryption, masking, archiving, and data deletion.

Varonis software offers a clear picture of all data, with flexible classifiers that allow for tailored policies according to different data types. The software not only provides exposure and threat analysis but also prides itself on true incremental scanning, thereby enhancing the overall data security and management experience.

Varonis Logo
VirusTotal Logo

VirusTotal is a cybersecurity tool built for the detection of questionable files, domains, IPs, and URLs that could host malware and other potentially harmful components.

Key features of VirusTotal include the extraction of suspicious signals from an array of properties, including Office document macros, invalid reference tables in PDFs, and packer details in Windows Executables. It also delivers multi-property searches through advanced modifiers, along with the ability to map threat actor campaigns fully via pivoting and similarity searches. VirusTotal’s aiding feature is the fast binary n-gram searches that complement file similarity searches, aiming to locate other attack variants and different kinds of malware linked to the same threat actor. In addition, VirusTotal enables the detonation of files in controlled virtual environments to monitor their activities and communications. This results in in-depth reporting which includes data about created and written files, contacted domains and URL lookups. It also runs backend processes such as sandboxing, inter-file relationship generation, email attachment extraction, URL to file mapping, and labeling files derived from honeypots.

The benefits of using VirusTotal include effective threat detection, seamless sharing with the security community, and profound reporting capabilities. These features allow VirusTotal users to handle potential cyber threats proactively and expertly.

VirusTotal Logo
The Top 9 File Analysis Software