Automated Permissions Housekeeping with C2C Helps E-mail Compliance

June 22nd, 2004

If your company is guaranteeing ISO compliance to customers, it's important to have all internal systems - including email - safe and secure.

"We have a particular Public folder that has critical information regarding our ISO compliance," says Dale Holley, Senior Network Engineer at Sartomer Company, Inc., a global supplier of specialty chemical products. "There are dozens of folders and subfolders involved in this public folder. Whenever a person leaves the company or changes positions, I have to add or remove them from the access list on this folder."

Holley uses a C2C product, Exchange Security Risk Auditor (ESRA) to perform automated audits of all permissions associated with an Exchange mailbox or public folder. "Without ESRA, it would take four to five hours to individually go through each folder in the hierarchy. With ESRA, it takes about five minutes to apply new permissions," he says.

Automated housekeeping with ESRA can help keep email secure. For example, in large organizations, system and department configurations tend to change over time, and users may be inadvertently granted access or carry historical permissions with them into different departments. Since there is no way to do this automatically in Exchange, ESRA can be used to resolve NT and Exchange permissions periodically, find deleted and anonymous users, and search SOBO ("Send On Behalf Of") permissions.

"We have had instances where a change somewhere in the Exchange messaging system removed or changed all the permissions on public folders," says Wayne Westfield, IT Lead North American Technical Infrastructure Services Group at Lehigh Cement in Allentown, PA. "Now IT departments can run ESRA and report/baseline the public folders, using this information to restore to a previously known state."

ESRA can search by site or by organization, and automated searches can ensure an appropriate level of security.

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