Streamlining access privileges

The more people who have elevated access privileges, the less secure your company is. The fact is, not everyone needs high-level access privileges; by being more careful, your company stands to gain a lot. Removing administrator rights isn't easy, mostly because end users want to install and remove their own software and configure their own settings, and developers often need to debug programs and load and unload device drivers. But there are ways companies can either reduce the number of administrator level users or reduce the impact of running a highly-privileged account, including adding users to an elevated group such as power users or network configuration operators, upgrading remote support and IT assistance, creating an application compatibility database, custom scripting, third-party solutions, removing applications, policy/business requirement redesign, assigning elevated permissions to users, delegation, and more. To reduce the need for elevated accounts in your network and to reduce the risk of users who must use elevated accounts, survey your environment's needs for elevated accounts to determine who needs what, rank each by the percentage of users who need it and the relative risk, choose one or more solutions that would work to solve the issues uncovered in the previous step, and choose one or more solutions for each risk category.

Learn more about streamlining access privilege:
- read the article at InfoWorld