The conclusion of David Gibson, VP of strategy, Varonis on 10 simple steps which can be employed to prevent data from being misused or stolen.

8. Audit Permissions and Group Membership Changes

Cleaning up permissions and group memberships is critical, but keeping everything in order is impossible without an audit trail of changes over time. Only by tracking all permissions and group membership changes can you be sure that only the right people continue to have access to your data sets. Enforcing access controls is simply impossible without a record of all the daily changes. If inappropriate access or group membership is granted, an audit trail of who made the change and when can help ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

9. Lock down, delete or archive stale data

In many organizations stale data is clogging up vast amounts of storage space and making it harder to manage. In addition to the cost of storing all of this stale data, keeping it on your active servers also increases the risk of it being misused. Automation can analyze access activity and identify any data that is not being used. Once the data owner confirms that he data is indeed stale and no longer needed, data may be archived or deleted.

10. Clean up stale groups and access control lists

Unneeded complexity slows performance and makes mistakes more likely. Organizations often have as many groups as they do users – many are empty, unused or redundant. Some groups contain other groups, which contain other groups, and so on. In some cases, these nested groups end up creating a circular reference where group ultimately contains itself. Also, access control lists often contain references to previously deleted users and groups (also known as “Orphaned SIDS”). These legacy groups and misconfigured access control objects should be identified and remediated to improve both performance and security.

Constant vigilance and automation are going to have to be your watchwords given the myriad number of threats which are now part of the IT security landscape. Automation will also have to be part of your armoury and, of course, you will have to keep up-to-date with all the new relevant threats. However, if you keep these top 10 tips that the head of your agenda you will be making your organisation a safer place to do business and are less obvious targets for hackers or insiders bent on stealing your secrets.