Key Business Problems for Systems & Data Administration

We wanted to take a minute and discuss some of the key business problems that Systems and Data Administrators face on a daily basis. Hopefully, bringing them to light will help you to examine what’s going on in your organization’s environment, and will help you to preempt some potentially costly situations.

There are three main areas that, in the places that they intersect, form the basis for data with real Business Value:

When you look at your environment, the areas of biggest concern can be broken down even further.

Permissions

Starting with Active Directory, users and groups form the foundation of control over what resources can be accessed on the Domain. Windows and distributed file systems extend the boundary of where users and groups can be created and have access to the resources that reside on those systems. Digging even deeper, users and groups can be granted access to shares, folders, and even to individual files. In order to assess and/or secure your data, all of those points and inheritance spots must be evaluated and considered in the equation of determining a user is effective level of access to resources on the Domain. Care must be taken before removing users from any of those permission points, as the removal or deny action could break their access to other valid and business critical resources across the domain.

Changes

Knowing who has what level of access to resources is important. Knowing who gave out that access or who is using their access to interact with resources is critical, especially when something goes wrong.

Content

On average, storage costs organizations $55/GB of data per month to maintain. Gartner estimates that 70% of unstructured data goes untouched 90 days after creation. That translates into gigabytes to terabytes of stale data, depending on the size of your user base. Archiving data to lower cost storage tiers can help or slow the capacity demands, but deleting the data will actually free up valuable storage resources.

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