How to track file access in Windows: A case study
Discover how to track file access on your Windows servers using FileAudit, and read how a leading U.S. biotech company uses it as a file access tracking solution.
Updated October 3, 2023)
)
)
)
Does your organization need to track file access? Do you need to monitor employee access to certain or all corporate files?
With a wealth of information stored on file servers and document management systems, there is a need to track file access to protect organizations against malicious insiders with authorized access that are looking to steal intellectual property.
In this article, we'll deep-dive into a customer case study to illustrate how FileAudit meets a common use case for Windows file monitoring and auditing.
The desire to proactively monitor, audit, and report on access to company files and folders on their Windows 2003, 2008 and 2012 servers drove a leading U.S. biotechnology company to search for a file auditing solution. At the time the company was not actively tracking file access, leaving sensitive corporate and accounting files at risk.
After determining that the development of an in-house solution would be time-consuming and lack key features such as alerts and automatic report delivery, the company quickly decided that FileAudit would provide the file security they required in a quick-to-install and easy-to-use solution.
“We needed the ability to record file access and keep tabs on who accessed what files” said the IT Systems & Support Administrator.
Today FileAudit provides the organization with complete real-time visibility of all read, write, delete accesses (or access attempts), file ownership changes and permission modifications.
FileAudit is about going beyond access control and logging capabilities — it’s a way to perform both proactive and reactive security monitoring.
With alerts and automatic reactions enabled, IT or management can immediately address any inappropriate access, reacting quickly to users accessing or sharing files. The definition of inappropriate may be customized to a path, file type, access type, etc.
By auditing all accesses to a file, if there are any security issues, a report can be run to see who’s accessed a file or folder and management can quickly address it with that individual.
Should the organization require file access records for compliance with SOX or other regulations, FileAudit provides centralization, recording, and long-term archiving of all file access events.
After installing FileAudit, the IT team was able to start monitoring and reporting on file access in less than 10 minutes.
What’s more, a series of quick video tutorials mean you can quickly learn how to track file access events across all your Windows Server. This video shows you how to take advantage of the powerful filtering capabilities that filter the access events by different criteria to focus only on the information you need.
