The sheer volume of highly publicized data security breaches in the news every day serve as an important reminder that data access governance must be a major part of your ongoing security activities, and not a one-time thing. It’s about time organizations got serious about governing access to their critical business data and reducing the likelihood of a potential data breach.
Data Access Governance: The Critical Concept
As published in Forbes, Gartner estimates that more than 80% organizational data is unstructured, residing everywhere from mailboxes to the cloud. This unstructured data represents a significant risk for every organization; if compromised, it could be very damaging to both the organization’s reputation and critical business information.
It is here, ‘Data Access Governance’ proves its value in assisting organizations to identify where all sensitive data resides, who owns it, who has access to it and how users interact with it.
Fundamental Capabilities
The goal of Data Access Governance is to deliver a process, which accounts ‘reviewing and controlling access to unstructured data to ensure only the necessary people maintain access.’ When formulating any Data Access Governance plan, there are fundamental capabilities an IT administrator must take into account:
- Platform : The ability to automatically discover where sensitive files and folders reside across all repositories, both on premise and in the cloud.
- Access : The ability to evaluate permissions held by a user to access a particular file or a folder in a dedicated File Server.
- Ownership : The ability vested amongst data owners who understand the nature and sensitivity of files and folders and make decisions on who should have access to them.
- Activity : The ability to evaluate access patterns and determine who should and who should not maintain their permissions to a varied network of files and folders.
- Sensitive Data : The ability to inspect the contents of folders, documents, spreadsheets, and other files where sensitive data resides.
Executing a comprehensive DAG strategy for File Server security
Once data access governance is employed, your files and folders will be immediately safer. Listed below are some of the basics principles behind why DAG helps to increase your File Server security.
- Enables users to acquire ownership and play a more active role in the governance of their data sources.
- Enables users to see entitlements across hundreds or thousands of file shares or servers.
- Enables users to leverage a common and consistent platform for access governance across entire data (especially unstructured).
- Enables users a to conduct a closed loop validation process for changes made to access permissions.
- Helps users achieve a significantly improved risk posture, reducing the severity of a potential data breach
Six Ways to Organize Unstructured Data in File Servers Using Lepide Data Security Platform
Firstly, you can’t control access to your sensitive data without a comprehensive file server monitoring strategy. This is where Lepide Data Security Platform comes in.
Our award-winning IT solution helps IT administrators get real insight into what unstructured data they have, who owns it, who is entitled to access it and who uses it. Below are six simple ways to ensure data access governance for File Server security using Lepide Data Security Platform:
1. Keep track of successful file reads
In the event of security breach, attackers are most likely to open and modify sensitive files and folders. As part of a comprehensive data access governance strategy, Lepide Data Security Platform enables you to identify successful file read attempts and when each read event occurred.
2. Spot suspicious user behavior
Deviations from normal user behavior can be indicative of a potential security breach in action. As part of a comprehensive data access governance plan, Lepide Data Security Platform delivers security analytics that help spot suspicious activity across your entire hybrid cloud IT environment. You can determine what normal user behavior looks like and get real time alerts whenever any trends break away from this norm.
3. Manage permissions centrally
Having data spread on different computers makes it difficult for IT administrators to grant or revoke permissions on files and folders. When strengthening your data access governance defenses, centralized management of permissions by using Lepide Data Security Platform locks down overexposed data and controls file and folder permissions in a quicker way. The solution helps you maintain proper access control by auditing all changes.
4. Visibility on all permission changes
Would you know if the permissions applied to an account began to spiral out of control? With Lepide Data Security Platform, you can keep an eye on how permissions are changing across your file servers. With an easy-to-use interface, you can quickly filter the permission changes based on users, files and folders. You can also get detailed information on which permissions were modified, who made the change and when and where the change occurred.
5. Quickly detect excessive access rights
Are you able to identify which users have access to protected files and folders that contain business-critical information and require special protection? As a defensive measure, Lepide Data Security Platform quickly drills down and detects excessive access rights to remediate overexposed data to prevent a potential data leak. The solution lets you be proactive against malicious insiders.
6. Protect your sensitive data
You can’t secure your data from the inside if you don’t know who owns it. Lepide Data Security Platform procures a list of owners for confidential files and folders across your file server within minutes. With this information, you can see which users need access to such data and which permissions should be removed immediately.
To learn more about how data access governance can help you improve your security, Schedule a demo with one of our engineers today