Use Case
Visibility and control over shared drives
The Problem
Shared drives are used to organize and secure information related to a department, team, project, customer, or for record keeping and quick access. While it’s easy to organize information in a shared drive, most companies struggle to manage and secure access to shared drives.
IT and Security teams often lack the ability to understand exactly what files and folders reside within a shared drive. And, they struggle to understand which internal and external accounts have access to those files.
Access to information in shared drives quickly gets blown out when accounts are added to folders in the drives, and to the drives themselves. An account can be granted access to thousands of documents sitting inside of a shared drive, in just seconds. Similarly, a quick change from a Restricted link to a Public link on a folder within a shared drive could suddenly allow thousands of documents to be accessible by anyone on the internet.
Shared drives often contain sensitive information that should not be accessed by just anyone. They’re typically used to organize sensitive information like customer data, contracts, or HR documents.
Although IT and Security teams are tasked with securing shared drives from being accessed by the wrong internal and external accounts, they have limited visibility and control over this type of access. Even hours of scripting typically won’t solve the problem. And as access to documents changes throughout the day, any work done through scripting becomes stale quickly.
There’s no way to easily view, manage, and restrict access for documents within specific shared drives in a quick, automated way. The process is often manual, time-consuming, and needs to be audited constantly—which wastes valuable time and resources.
The Solution
IT and Security admins need a solution to target specific shared drives, see exactly what documents and folders reside within them, understand who has access to each asset, and quickly remediate any issues. An ideal tool would have an easy way to identify all shared drives, filter by specific shared drives, and rapidly create rules to secure them and their contents.
Admins would be able to view risks within shared drives - seeing who has access to them and what level of access they have. IT and Security teams could easily discern if any shared drives were accessible by third parties such as personal accounts or outside domains. And, they could know if the contents within the shared drives had unnecessary Public or Company links. An ideal solution would allow administrators to focus on specific shared drives - like those containing customer information - and quickly protect that information.
IT and Security teams need a tool to quickly and easily automate these tasks. The optimal solution would be proactive, rather than reactive—mitigating and eliminating risks before they become breaches or incidents.