GoKawiilFrom soaring cloud costs to risk ownership, data sovereignty and legacy compatibility, there are many reasons why organizations continue to rely on file servers for inexpensive and abundant local storage. Yet no matter where your data lives, access governance is essential to keeping it in the right hands.
Even firmly into the cloud era, countless organizations continue to maintain on-premises file servers alongside their various SaaS subscriptions. These kinds of hybrid setups help businesses preserve large volumes of data while maintaining full control over cost, risk, retention, backups and access.
While the convenience of cloud services is still a big draw that drives many ongoing migration efforts, concerns like spiking subscription costs, data ownership and regulatory demands have caused others to pause or even rethink their cloud strategy.
So despite predictions of a gleaming, cloud-only future, it appears that the humble file server will stick around as an IT mainstay for years to come. No matter the reason your organization continues to rely on file servers, the important part is that you administer them securely and efficiently.
With the level of control and risk ownership that on-premises infrastructure affords you, effective access governance is essential to protecting your data.
Here are five best practices that every file server administrator needs to know.
#1: Never assign permissions directly to users
In order to grant a user access to a directory, you should always use a dedicated, single-purpose security group that follows a consistent naming scheme such as fs_finance_read.
Even though most admins are aware of this, sticking to the rule can be tricky in practice when some higher-up is shouting about how a team member needs access RIGHT NOW.
The problem with assigning access directly to users is that there is no way to track these one-off permissions. When you inspect a user object, you can see every group they are a member of. By naming groups after the permission they grant, this effectively doubles as a list of everything a user has access to.
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