Hello and welcome to Chesapeake Digital Technology´s blog. We’re an information technology firm in Maryland providing two services, Internet Marketing / SEO and Technical Support to small and medium business.

Your small business has graduated to a medium-sized business. Congratulations! Now that you have a lot more employees, you also have a lot more business being done. The old ways of preventing people from accessing certain data or, worse, not putting precautions in place won’t work anymore. You’ve got to put up walls to make sure that no one gets greedy and goes looking through private data. If you’re running a Windows environment, which the odds say you are, then Security Groups, a part of Active Directory, are a good place to start. Your network administrator will be responsible for rolling this out, but this will give you a good idea of how this works.

Security Groups are a logical organization of users on your network. These groups are good for setting users apart as needed. The easiest way to do this is sorting by department. However, you can sort these groups in any way you like. Now, the best part of this is that you can tailor your security measures to these groups. This includes access lists and control restrictions.

Another great use for Security Groups is rolling out new policies. You can determine which groups get which updates when. This is good when you don’t know how an update could potentially affect a network. You can deploy to these custom groups beforehand. Several popular solutions are Microsoft Active Directory for a Microsoft Windows or mixed Windows, Unix, Linux environment, Likewise Open for Unix / Linux/ Mac environment, or  Centrify Suite for Unix / Linux/ Mac environment.

-Josh

CDTek