Suspicious of accessing of your crucial data stored within files and folders in your computer system in your absence by any unauthorized personnel! An unauthorized user may perform different actions in the files and folders containing crucial business or personal data and information like he/she can read, edit, share, crate, rename, delete or move the file or folder without your permission. To avoid these actions, it is mandatory keep track of all the changes to files and folders.
Microsoft Windows itself provides an inbuilt feature with the help of which one can easily determine Who accessed a file or a folder using your account or any other user account and When. This inbuilt feature is basically a part of Group Policy Editor that controls the working environment of user accounts and computer accounts. This feature facilitates centralized management and configuration of Operating Systems, applications, and users’ settings in Active Directory environment.
This native File system auditing process presents complete information regarding Who, What, When and Where information about File system events but might be tedious for novice users and requires significant amount of efforts as logs are scattered around with lot of unuseful data. Windows event viewer may prove helpful for administrators in analyzing File system logs manually, but it also requires significant amount of time to uncover the facts and that too not in a desirable format.
Native File system auditing suffers from numerous drawbacks like:
- Presents information in a non-understandable format
- Scattered logs
- Limited or short-term storage of logs
- Failure in protecting an organization against unauthorized access, changes made to files and folders, and compliance violation
- Lacks comprehensive reporting
- No instant alert generation on critical changes
- No built-in reports to meet compliance requirements
- Absence of a centralized platform to look into the File system event logs
- Data loss in case of log overwriting
- Inefficient storage
Within an organization there might be different kind of crucial data and information stored such as financial reports, organizational records, client details, organization intellectual assets, etc. that need to be prevented from unauthorized access. This arises the need for comprehensive File system auditing within an organization. Some other reasons may include:
- To prevent unauthorized access to crucial business data
- Analyze access rights given to users
- Keep File systems safe from intentional changes made to permissions
- Eliminate destructive changes to files and folders
- Monitor the activities of delegated users to eliminate risk factors
- Archive changes to support forensic investigations
- Get event details in simple understandable English
Numerous third-party solutions are available nowadays for File System auditing letting users monitor the accessing of file and folders on their computer system. File Server Auditor is a perfect file server auditing and reporting software that overcomes all the drawbacks of native file server auditing. The software provides complete information on Who changed What, When and from Where and helps protecting an organization against numerous regulatory compliances. The software allows monitoring employee’s file system activities from a centralized location. Some major functions of this File Server Auditor software include intelligent audit, real-time event analysis, comprehensive and flexible report generation, instant alerts, and schedule reports.
- Provides complete information about Who changed What, When and from Where for all access attempts and changes made to Files, Folders, Shares and Permissions on the File Server.
- Reports on all access rights given to users and Files and Folders that they are accessing to give complete control to administrators.
- Consolidates event logs from all File servers in the network and reports and alerts on important event from a centralized platform.
- Archives event logs for long time helpful in forensic investigations.
- Generates real-time alerts on critical events such as unauthorized access to folders containing sensitive data and deletion or modification to important files.
File Server Auditor overcomes all the drawbacks of Native File System Auditing. The report generation feature of the software generates detailed and simplified reports that can be saved in .DOC, .XLS, HTML, and Text formats for future reference and better accessibility. Moreover, the software sends alerts in case any user access the data stored in sensitive files and folders. The alerts could be easily sent via email, network or SMS to the concerned recipient.