Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026
DataShield vs Varonis: can a data security platform prove what your AI agents did?
Varonis has been doing data security since 2005, and they are good at it. Their platform crawls the whole estate, tells you where the sensitive files live, who can open them, and who is acting strangely, then strips the permissions nobody should have had. DSPM, data access governance, database activity monitoring, 24/7 managed response. If you run a big Microsoft shop, this is the map you want.
We do a narrower job. Datasets are tokenized at ingest; agents query tokenized data over MCP; detokenization is a privileged, audited operation. Every governed tool call gets checked against the agent's current authority, and each decision is sealed into a hash chain you can verify without trusting us. Varonis finds the data. We govern what an agent does with it and keep the receipt. Below is the honest split, including the rows Varonis wins.
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 access 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 authority 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, and you'd rather run the whole thing on your own infrastructure 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, and you need one platform watching all of it with data access governance and automatic permission 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 obligation 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 as of the date above. If we've mischaracterised something, email support@myorg.ai and we'll correct it, credited.
| What matters | DataShield | Varonis | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sensitive-data discovery | We scan, profile and classify a live PostgreSQL source in place, with no rows leaving it. Columns get labelled against 129 field classes covering PII, PHI, financial data and secrets, and the catalog carries a business glossary, typed lineage and stewardship queues. That is PostgreSQL today, not your whole estate: SaaS apps, cloud stores and endpoints are not ours, and the other database providers are declared but not built yet. Not a DSPM, and we do not crawl your file shares. | Discovery and classification across files, M365, Salesforce, cloud storage and databases, with a stated 99% accuracy at scale. This is what they are famous for. | ◇ |
| Audit evidence | SHA-256 hash chain with Ed25519-signed checkpoints that are themselves chained. Verification names the failure: tampering, insertion, deletion or truncation. Public verifier. | A forensics layer that normalizes logs into searchable audit trails. Searchable is not the same as tamper-evident. We found no published cryptographic chain or verifier. | ◆ |
| Agent authorization | Every governed tool call passes a scope ceiling, a declared authority tier and a revocation re-check before dispatch. The decision is per call and it is logged. | Agent Intent-Based Access Control in Varonis Atlas, which gates agent access on inferred intent. Real, and distinctive. We found no scope ceiling, authority tier or mid-session revocation described. | ◈ |
| Break-glass | Scoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents that auto-revokes and can't be quietly removed from the log. | Not described in their public materials. | ◆ |
| GDPR erasure | Crypto-shred of per-subject key material plus ISO 27560 consent receipts. Actor identities are HMAC-committed, so the chain still verifies after the subject is gone. | Permission remediation and policy-driven clean-up. We couldn't find a crypto-shred erasure primitive, or a statement about what erasure does to the audit history. | ◆ |
| Tokenization and data handling | Datasets are tokenized at ingest; agents query tokenized data over MCP; detokenization is a privileged, audited operation. Tokens are deterministic, join-preserving and vault-reversible. | Access is gated, monitored and right-sized. The underlying values stay as they are. Tokenization is not in their vocabulary. | ◆ |
| Inline AI enforcement | We do not proxy your LLM traffic. We do gate every value that leaves a governed dataset for a prompt: a PII or PHI column with no configured treatment is redacted, and a PHI dataset refuses any AI endpoint that is not marked BAA or ZDR approved. That is a gate on our own data path, not an inline product. | Atlas enforces policy inline before a prompt reaches the model, including an integration 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 evidence. | 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, and per-call metering attributed to the agent. | Atlas covers AI tools, agents and copilots. We found no MCP-protocol support named anywhere in their public materials. | ◆ |
| Deployment | Self-hosted or dedicated single-tenant. Your keys, including the detokenization keys. | SaaS-first, with a long on-prem heritage and a SaaS conversion 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 licensed 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 coverage, 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, and the verifier names what went wrong instead of just saying something did. That's the property 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. With DataShield the next governed tool call is re-checked against current authority and fails closed. Intent inference doesn't help you here, because 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 deterministic, join-preserving 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 of building this, a public balance sheet, 2,650 people, and the deepest Windows, Active Directory and M365 coverage anyone has. If the question is "where is our sensitive data and who can reach it," Varonis answers it better than we ever will, because we don't answer it at all. Their permission remediation is genuinely useful work that most teams never get around to doing 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 acquisitions in eighteen months, including AllTrue.ai at $150M for AI monitoring, means the AI-security story was largely bought rather than grown, and bought parts take time to become one architecture. Worth asking on the call: which console produces the artifact, and how many data models does it cross? More to the point, none of it transforms the data or produces cryptographic evidence. Gartner expects most unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 to be internal policy violations, not attacks. Inferring an agent's intent is a reasonable heuristic. It is not the same as a recorded decision you can hand to 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, including ours.
Can you cryptographically prove an audit log entry wasn't deleted?
DataShield: yes. Each record commits to the one before it, checkpoints are signed and chained, and verification 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 normalizes logs into searchable audit trails. Searchable trails are useful for investigation. Ask them whether anything stops an entry being changed, and whether you can verify that yourself.
What happens to a revoked agent mid-session?
DataShield re-checks authority on every governed tool call, so revocation lands on the next call. Varonis Atlas gates agent access through Agent Intent-Based Access Control, which reasons about what the agent is trying to do. We couldn't find mid-session revocation semantics in their public materials. 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, so the evidence still verifies after the subject is erased. Varonis documents discovery, policy and remediation across connected systems. We couldn't find a described crypto-shred mechanism or a statement about erasure versus audit history. Ask whether erasing a subject breaks the log, because those two obligations pull in opposite directions.
Is DataShield a DSPM? Do we still need Varonis?
No, and probably yes. We are not a data security posture management tool and we won't pretend to be one. We don't crawl your file shares or score your cloud buckets. We govern what agents do with datasets we ingest, and we keep verifiable evidence of it. If you're already running Varonis for discovery and data access governance, keep it, and put us where the agent tool calls happen.
Agent IBAC versus your per-call checks: what's the actual difference?
Varonis infers what an agent is trying to do and decides based on that. We check three concrete things before dispatch: the token's scope ceiling, the declared authority tier, and whether the agent was revoked since the last call. Intent inference catches the agent going somewhere odd. Scope and revocation catch the agent going somewhere it was never allowed, or somewhere it stopped being allowed thirty seconds ago. They're complementary, and 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 is a real gap against a public company that lists FedRAMP, ISO and SOC. What we offer instead: Auth is live a published threat model and a verifier anyone can run without talking to us. Guardian and Lighthouse have been 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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DSPMDataShield vs Sentra
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AllEvery comparison
One honest scorecard per vendor, rows we lose included.
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