An employee needs access to a specific file folder on a shared drive. You have no idea whether they should have access to this folder and you spend more time than you would like hunting and sorting through extensive sets of user and group permissions.
Another common problem with user permissions is when employees leave an organization. You need to modify their access rights or they can continue to access data – but what do they have access to?
Internal Employees having liberal access rights to sensitive information can be difficult to detect, and any misuse can be catastrophic. Unauthorized access could lead to:
- Access to private information
- Spread of spam and/or malicious code
- Implementation of unauthorized changes to data or programs or stolen data files
According to a 2011 Survey conducted by Ponemon Institute, 49 percent of breaches were caused by internal employees and 52 percent of security breaches were caused by internal abuse.
File Access Control is Complex
Maintaining file security is critical but managing file permissions is complex and error prone. Some factors that make file access control a complex affair include:
- Conflicts between share and NTFS permissions, especially when multiple shares exist on a given branch
- Difficulty of finding folders with inherited permissions or blocked inheritance Quantity of files
- Lack of knowledge about the files, the type of information they hold, and who should really be the owner
- Difficulty locating all the files to which a given user or group has access
- Confusion over how permission inheritance works
An ideal solution to simplify researching file permissions is a tool that would help you analyze all the user permissions and give you visibility into access rights. Having all this information made visible from a dashboard can help you unravel the complexity of who has permissions for what in just a few clicks.
Relax, Sysadmin Superheroes!
Analyzing file permissions doesn’t have to hurt your brain. The next time someone asks you questions like: “Why can't Jim edit that Microsoft Word file?,” “Why can't Christine in accounting access the accounting network share?,” and “Why can’t Scotty in engineering get to a file on the network share – even Windows says he should have access?,” try SolarWinds Free NTFS Permissions Analyzer for Active Directory.
With the permissions analyzer free tool, unravel:
- File permissions
- Network share permissions
- Folder permissions
- Active Directory group permissions
- Inherent permissions
- Explicit permissions
- Calculated permissions
- Analyze user permissions based on group membership combined with specific permissions and view the results in a hierarchical format
The free SolarWinds NTFS Permissions Analyzer for Active Directory dashboard displays various user permissions as well as Users NTFS and Share level permissions.
Author Bio: Jennifer is a Product Marketing Manager for SolarWinds, an IT management software provider based in Austin, Texas, and focuses on systems management. She has roots in Oklahoma but has made her home high-tech capital of Texas for over 15 years, specializing in product management, strategy and marketing with solid knowledge of the systems and application and virtualization management market segments.
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