When it comes to protecting spreadsheets, documents, images and other data on file servers, SharePoint sites, and in Exchange mailboxes and public folders, most organizations readily admit that their current processes and risk profiles are less than ideal. Unfortunately, IT personnel – rather than the people that own the data – are the ones making many of the decisions about permissions, acceptable use, and access review. Since IT personnel do not have the business context behind the growing volumes of unstructured and semi-structured data, they’re only able to make a best-effort guess as to how to manage and protect each data set.
Until organizations start to shift the decision making responsibility to business data owners, IT, despite its best efforts, will continue to struggle to keep file permissions current and correct as data grows and user roles change.
