Panzura, the company empowering modern enterprises to unlock the full potential of their unstructured data, is unveiling Access Control List (ACL) analysis and automated remediation to the Symphony data services platform—the centralized platform for gaining complete visibility, always-on governance, and real-time metadata access. This release addresses the trillion-dollar global crisis of permission sprawl—which currently impacts 58% of enterprises—amid the push for AI implementation.
Permission awareness is crucial for the success of any business, though especially to those pursuing AI projects. According to Core Team One (CTO), 74% of data breaches involve privileged credential abuse, illustrating a significant challenge within permissions security. AI can potentially exacerbate this problem, utilizing existing permissions to reveal sensitive data to users.
However, simply knowing if an enterprise’s permissions are too broken or too permissive is not enough. They must be fixed—and ideally before malicious impact.
Panzura’s SCL analysis and automated remediation integrates observability, reporting, and actionability toward permissions risk to not only surface issues, but resolve them proactively with a Repair ACLs Policy. Expanding Symphony’s “any to any” data management and orchestration, the platform now continuously tracks down, monitors, and automatically fixes bloated permissions before they’re exploited—regardless of the underlying infrastructure.
By identifying and remediating anomalous permissions across entire file systems with automated detection and mass permission changes, Symphony’s comprehensive visibility drives accelerated resolution of problematic access. Not only does this capability resolve bloated permissions, it consolidates security tool sprawl, leading to less IT friction and resource expenditure. Interactive ACL Analysis in Symphony includes:
- Concise, drill-down views of complex permission inheritance
- Human-readable DACLs and SACLs with adjustable detail levels
- Change tracking from previous scans to spot potential suspicious activity
- Exports to database, CSV, or JSON for further analysis
Once identified, the Repair ACLs Policy automatically analyzes and repairs broken ACL inheritance for both DACLs and SACLs using administrator-defined policies, saving significant time and reducing errors by eliminating manual remediation.
The significance of ACL Analysis is crucial for AI implementation, where, as Mike Harvey, SVP of technology at Panzura, explains, “What's becoming apparent with the AI initiatives that stall or fail is that it's not like they're really trying to do anything new—they're just faster…and they can access more than a human can.”
“So it's almost like you had a road that wasn't perfect; it had some potholes, had some bumps, but that was fine, because the vehicle you had was pretty slow…[However,] now you have a Lamborghini on the same road. And if you haven't got everything in ship-shape condition—classification, quality, access, paths, security, all of those pillars—as you accelerate down that road…the car is going to break…and you'll have to start again,” Harvey continued.
“Rather than trying to boil the ocean, [you need to] understand what the landscape looks like so you can comfortably say, and with a high degree of confidence, ‘I can start my AI initiatives on this data set because of these reasons,’” added Harvey. “Symphony gives you that ability.”
In conjunction with ACL Analysis and Repair ACLs Policy, Symphony now uses and preserves actionable metadata insights—such as ownership and comprehensive ACLs—during automated data movement between file systems, object stores, and cloud storage. By enhancing the handling of named metadata, such as Windows ADS and EA, through named metadata rule matching, Symphony deepens data insight and control. This delivers structure to unstructured data, ensuring fine-grained control and automation that might otherwise be abandoned with legacy data migration tools, according to Panzura.
Advanced metadata management offers:
- Dataset selection based on metadata presence or content
- Comprehensive EA reporting in Scan Policies
- Export to database, CSV, and JSON formats
- Set EA values directly from database and catalog sources
Additionally, Symphony now supports NetApp FlexGroup Volumes, expanding the platform’s capabilities for large-scale, high-performance file system environments. This announcement also introduces support for IBM Storage Deep Archive for cold data, enabling on-premises archiving of massive datasets using an S3 Glacier compatible interface.
To learn more about Panzura’s latest capabilities, please visit https://panzura.com/.