Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026
DataShield vs Varonis: can a data security platform prove what your AI agents did?
Varonis has done data security since 2005, and they're good at it. Their platform crawls the whole estate. It tells you where the sensitive files live. Who can open them. Who is acting strangely. Then it strips the permissions nobody should have had. DSPM, data access rules, database activity watch, 24/7 managed response. If you run a big Microsoft shop, this is the map you want.
We do a narrower job. Datasets get tokenized at ingest. Agents query tokenized data over MCP. Turning a token back into real data is a locked, logged step. Each checked tool call gets tested against the agent's live access. Each result gets sealed into a hash chain you can check without trusting us. Varonis finds the data. We control what an agent does with it, and keep the receipt. Below is the honest split. It has the rows Varonis wins, too.
The short version
Pick DataShield when
- An examiner, an auditor, or the EU AI Act's Article 12 will one day ask you to prove an agent's log wasn't edited. Our chain answers with math. A searchable log answers with a promise. Run the verifier.
- You want the agent to query tokenized values, not the real ones. Gating access still leaves the raw data at the other end of the gate.
- You need to pull an agent's access mid-session, and have the very next tool call fail closed. Not wait for a token to expire.
- You'd rather see a price before you book a call. You'd rather run the whole thing on your own gear, with your own keys.
Pick Varonis when
- You don't yet know where your sensitive data is. That's their home turf, and we are not a discovery tool. Their platform page claims 99% classification accuracy at scale.
- Your estate is file shares, Microsoft 365, Salesforce and databases. You need one platform watching all of it, with data access governance and auto rights clean-up.
- You want somebody else on the pager. MDDR carries a 30-minute SLA for ransomware, and 120 minutes for everything else. We don't sell a managed service.
- Procurement wants a public company with FedRAMP, ISO and SOC on the page. Varonis did about $638.5M in FY2025. We are small, and we say so.
Bottom line: most teams who already run Varonis should keep running Varonis. The question isn't which platform wins. It's which layer the duty lands in. Varonis tells you where the data is, and who can reach it. DataShield decides whether this agent may make this tool call on tokenized data, and leaves proof that it did.
Feature by feature: DSPM and data access governance versus agent authorization
Competitor cells describe what Varonis's public site, product pages and blog say. We use the date above. If we got something wrong, email support@myorg.ai. We'll fix it and credit you.
| What matters | DataShield | Varonis | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sensitive-data discovery | We scan, profile and tag a live PostgreSQL source in place. No rows leave it. Columns get labelled against 129 field classes covering PII, PHI, money data and secrets. The catalog carries a business glossary, typed lineage and steward queues. That's PostgreSQL today, not your whole estate. SaaS apps, cloud stores and endpoints aren't ours. Other database types are planned, not built yet. Not a DSPM. We don't crawl your file shares. | Discovery and tagging across files, M365, Salesforce, cloud storage and databases. A stated 99% accuracy at scale. This is what they're famous for. | ◇ |
| Audit evidence | A SHA-256 hash chain, with Ed25519-signed checkpoints. Those checkpoints are themselves chained. Checking names the failure: tampering, insertion, deletion, or truncation. Try the verifier. | A forensics layer that turns logs into searchable audit trails. Searchable isn't the same as tamper-evident. We found no public hash chain or verifier. | ◆ |
| Agent authorization | Each checked tool call passes a scope ceiling, a set access tier, and an access re-check. Before dispatch. The result is per call, and it's logged. | Agent Intent-Based Access Control in Varonis Atlas gates agent access on guessed intent. Real, and distinctive. We found no scope ceiling, access tier, or a mid-session pull, named. | ◈ |
| Break-glass | Scoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents. It auto-revokes. It can't be quietly wiped from the log. | Not named in their public docs. | ◆ |
| GDPR erasure | Crypto-shred of per-subject key material, plus ISO 27560 consent receipts. Actor identities are HMAC-committed. The chain still checks out after the subject is gone. | Permission fixes and rule-driven clean-up. We couldn't find a crypto-shred step, or a line about what erasure does to the log record. | ◆ |
| Tokenization and data handling | Datasets get tokenized at ingest. Agents query tokenized data over MCP. Turning a token back into real data is a locked, logged step. Tokens are fixed, join-safe, and vault-reversible. | Access is gated, watched, and right-sized. The values underneath stay as they are. Tokenization isn't in their vocabulary. | ◆ |
| Inline AI enforcement | We don't proxy your LLM traffic. We do gate each value that leaves a checked dataset for a prompt. A PII or PHI column with no set rule gets redacted. A PHI dataset refuses any AI endpoint not marked BAA or ZDR approved. That's a gate on our own data path. Not an inline product. | Atlas enforces rules inline, before a prompt reaches the model. That has a link with Claude, via inference hooks. If you want prompt-time interception, they have it, and we don't. | ◇ |
| Managed detection and response | Not offered. You run it. We give you the mechanisms and the proof. | MDDR, staffed 24/7/365, with a 30-minute ransomware SLA and 120 minutes for other alerts. Plus threat hunting. | ◇ |
| MCP and agents | Native MCP endpoints on Auth, Ontology and Lighthouse. Auth-issued MCP tool tokens with scope ceilings. Per-call metering, tied to the agent. | Atlas covers AI tools, agents and copilots. We found no MCP-protocol support named anywhere in their public docs. | ◆ |
| Deployment | Self-hosted, or dedicated single-tenant. Your keys. That has the detokenization keys, too. | SaaS-first, with a long on-prem history. A SaaS shift targeting $737M to $745M ARR by 2026. | ◈ |
| Maturity signals | Auth, Guardian and Lighthouse are live in production. Guardian and Lighthouse since April 2026. SOC 2 not yet certified, and we say so. | Founded 2005. NASDAQ listed. About $638.5M FY2025 revenue. Roughly 2,650 staff. FedRAMP, ISO and SOC named on the platform page. | ◇ |
| Pricing | Published model, scoped instant quote, no sales wall. | Quote only. The pricing page routes to a demo request. Historically priced by data volume and seats. | ◆ |
◆ DataShield leads◇ Varonis leads◈ comparable
Varonis claims are drawn from varonis.com product pages, the Varonis blog, and public company filings. Last checked 13 September 2026. We link the sources below rather than paraphrase from memory.
Three things you get here that you won't get from a data security platform
Proof, not just search
A log you can search is still a log you can edit. Ours is a hash chain with signed checkpoints. The verifier names what went wrong, instead of just saying something did. That's the trait EU AI Act Article 12 and HIPAA §164.312(b) reviewers care about. Try it in your browser, no signup.
Authority that changes mid-flight
An analyst resigns on a Tuesday. Their agent is 20 minutes into a 40-minute job. The next checked tool call gets re-checked against live access. It fails closed. Intent guessing doesn't help you here. The intent hasn't changed. The permission has. How Auth does it.
The data itself is already tokenized
Gating access is a door. Tokenization changes what's behind the door. Agents query fixed, join-safe tokens that still join across tables. So analytics keep working, while raw values stay in the vault. See the architecture.
Where Varonis is genuinely stronger
Twenty years building this. A public balance sheet. 2,650 people. The deepest Windows, Active Directory and M365 coverage anyone has. Ask "where is our sensitive data, and who can reach it?" Varonis answers it better than we ever will. We don't answer it at all. Their rights fixes are genuinely useful work that most teams never get around to by hand. MDDR puts a staffed team behind a 30-minute ransomware SLA. Agent IBAC is a real mechanism, and it shipped before most of the category had a slide about it.
Here's the push-back. Five buys in eighteen months. That has AllTrue.ai, at $150M, for AI monitoring. The AI-security story was largely bought, not grown. Bought parts take time to become one system. Worth asking on the call: which console makes the record, and how many data models does it cross? More to the point, none of it changes the data or makes cryptographic proof. Gartner expects most unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 to be internal rule breaks, not attacks. Guessing an agent's intent is a fair heuristic. It's not the same as a recorded decision. One you can hand an examiner eighteen months later, and have them believe it.
Questions worth asking both of us
These are the questions we'd want answered if we were buying. Ask them on every vendor call. Ours included.
Can you cryptographically prove an audit log entry wasn't deleted?
DataShield: yes. Each record ties to the one before it. Checkpoints are signed and chained. Checking tells deletion apart from truncation and from tampering. Run it on a sample chain at /verify. Varonis: their platform page describes a forensics layer that turns logs into searchable audit trails. Searchable trails are useful for investigation. Ask them whether anything stops an entry being changed, and whether you can check that yourself.
What happens to a revoked agent mid-session?
DataShield re-checks access on each checked tool call. The pull lands on the next call. Varonis Atlas gates agent access through Agent Intent-Based Access Control. It reasons about what the agent is trying to do. We couldn't find mid-session pull rules in their public docs. Ask both of us the same way: how many seconds does a pulled agent keep working?
How does GDPR erasure interact with the audit trail?
DataShield crypto-shreds per-subject key material, and issues an ISO 27560 consent receipt. Actor identities in the chain are HMAC-committed. The proof still checks out after the subject is erased. Varonis documents discovery, rules and fixes across connected systems. We couldn't find a crypto-shred step, or a line about erasure versus the audit record. Ask whether erasing a subject breaks the log. Those two duties pull in opposite directions.
Is DataShield a DSPM? Do we still need Varonis?
No, and probably yes. We are not a data security posture tool, and we won't pretend to be one. Your file shares don't get crawled, nor do we score your cloud buckets. We control what agents do with datasets we ingest, and we keep proof you can check. If you're already running Varonis for discovery and data access rules, keep it. Put us where the agent tool calls happen.
Agent IBAC versus your per-call checks: what's the actual difference?
Varonis guesses what an agent is trying to do, and decides based on that. We check three plain things before dispatch. The token's scope ceiling. The set access tier. Whether the agent lost access since the last call. Intent guessing catches the agent going someplace odd. Scope and access checks catch the agent going where it was never allowed. Or where it stopped being allowed thirty seconds ago. They're a good pair. We'd run both, if we were a big enough shop to afford both.
Does DataShield have SOC 2?
Not yet, and we won't imply otherwise. That's a real gap against a public company that lists FedRAMP, ISO and SOC. What we offer instead: Auth is live. It ships with a public threat model, and a verifier anyone can run with no call to us. Guardian and Lighthouse have run in production since April 2026. Design-partner terms include source escrow. So a small vendor isn't a single point of failure. Details on the security page.
- Varonis hero: "SECURE AI AND THE DATA THAT POWERS IT." Primary CTAs are "Get a demo" and "Free risk assessment." - varonis.com, 13 Sep 2026
- Platform modules include DSPM, data access governance, DLP, ITDR and database activity monitoring, with classification stated at 99% accuracy at scale; FedRAMP, ISO, SOC and HIPAA named. - varonis.com product page, 13 Sep 2026
- MDDR is staffed 24/7/365 with a 30-minute SLA for ransomware and 120 minutes for all other alerts. - varonis.com/products/mddr, 13 Sep 2026
- Agent Intent-Based Access Control "helps enterprises bridge the gap between 'agent deployed' and 'agent trusted'." - Varonis blog, 3 Aug 2026
- Varonis Atlas "enforces data protection policy inline before a prompt ever reaches the model," extended to Claude via inference hooks. - Varonis blog, 7 Aug 2026
- FY2025 revenue about $638.5M, roughly 2,650 employees, SaaS conversion targeting $737M to $745M ARR by 2026; AllTrue.ai acquired Feb 2026 for $150M and SlashNext Sep 2025 for $150M. - Varonis Systems company record, 13 Sep 2026
- ≥80% of unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 will be internal policy violations rather than attacks. - Gartner, 2026
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AllEvery comparison
One honest scorecard per vendor, rows we lose included.
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