It is important to keep the business information secured. When working with the information, it is also of the essence to remember about the notion of permissions as this is the basic (but powerful) means of protecting the data from the unsanctioned access. File and folder permissions involve the digital division of the staff into groups under the authority level of the latter. For instance, a scheme may be implemented where an accountant will only have the access to the data that refers to bookkeeping and any other financial information concerning the business. In other words, the critical point of the access policy is to prohibit employees of accessing the data that does not relate to their duties in any way. A note to remember is also the fact that not every crew member may be a skilled PC user, so the goal is to assess the risk possibility before something irreparable happens (E.g., data corruption, theft, or inaccessibility) that would lead to profit or, what is even worse, to a complete business loss.
The necessary buy-in, in this case, is not pricey or hard-to-get. Several servers would be a reasonable acquisition for the company. With the purchase of new servers, the IT department will be able to configure the backup server and run data replication between servers for the maximum data security. The replication would also relieve the load that has constantly been exerted on the host computer before the purchase of additional servers.
NTFS permissions for files and folders should be considered the best reliable option at the business unit leaders’ disposal simply for the reason that it is free, and it does not require any additional purchases or fees. Secondly, it only entails some basic network knowledge from the system administrator to set up the permissions, access privileges, and account policies properly. Additionally, the system administrator has to remember about the cumulative nature of the NTFS permissions for the reason that the most limiting authorizations should apply when both NTFS and share permissions are set up for the folder (Palmer & Walters, 2012). A proper permission management strategy will allow to take full advantage of the employees’ time and expand business efficiency.
Another point in the company’s list on the way to perfecting the data protection should be the adoption of Active Directory and Group Policy Objects features. The plan for utilizing these two technologies would involve the setup of a central repository that would allow managing the company’s information while being globally distributed (Desmond, Richards, Allen, & Lowe-Norris, 2013). The plan would involve the use of the organizational units with the intention of assigning control and administrative rights to the users. In order to use the Group Policy feature effectively, it is reasonable to link it with other applications used by the company (E.g., Microsoft Office package) and install Group Policy add-ons and templates (Stanek, 2015). When working on the plan development, the administrator should remember that Group Policy configuration options are by default divided into two categories – users and computers – and the effects of the Group Policy are cumulative as well, similar to those of the NTFS permissions.
Data security is an important topic and a sensitive issue for any business, so the company has to find the best solution possible in terms of the price-quality ratio. Taking it into account, it should be noted that the purchase of a remote server and its subsequent setup in addition to the installation of the Active Directory and Group Policy features will make an invaluable contribution to the company’s data security.
References
Desmond, B., Richards, J., Allen, R., & Lowe-Norris, A. G. (2013). Active Directory Designing, Deploying, and Running Active Directory. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly & Associates.
Palmer, M., & Walters, M. (2012). Guide to Operating Systems. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.
Stanek, W. (2015). Windows Group Policy: The Personal Trainer for Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2. Almont, MI: Stanek & Associates.