White Papers for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX)

Preventing Data Loss: Ten Imperatives

Varonis

Consider that the majority of your data, between 80 to 90 percent, resides on file servers. Now think about how you are controlling access to those shares. Most organizations find themselves with overly permissive access controls. Employees join and leave the organization frequently, and roles, responsibilities and project teams change quickly as well. All this leads to more access permission granted than revoked, since it is nearly impossible to manually keep up with the changes. The result is that most folders on file shares are oversubscribed in terms of access by well over 70%. By fixing broken access control to your file servers, you can significantly reduce the probability of data misuse in your environment.

Any program to reduce the probability of data loss and misuse has to start with rightful and warranted access controls. Ensuring that only the right people can get to the right data at all times not only reduces the odds of misuse, it also makes any subsequent safeguards and loss prevention techniques more cost effective and pragmatic to deploy. Consider a folder containing confidential data. If it is open to “everyone” or to a large number of individuals then (1) anyone can access and misuse the data, and (2) access by everyone must be monitored and audited – which is not a realistic undertaking. Alternatively, limiting access to those who actually need the data, and reporting on their access patterns, is realistic and a practical way to ensure that data access permissions are not abused.

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