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This first-of-its-kind capability, which no other provider offers, significantly expands Symphony’s comprehensive “any to any” data management and orchestration across the broad array of modern enterprise file and object storage environments.

Unlike currently available file data security tools that simply react to incidents, Symphony continuously tracks down, monitors, and automatically fixes bloated permissions before they can be exploited by malicious actors. This slashes risk exposure and allows IT teams to report on and prove compliance with regulations, service level agreements (SLAs), and board-level mandates.

Permission sprawl is a real and present epidemic that reaches into every corner of the enterprise, with 74% of data breaches involving privileged credential abuse. Because sysadmins and security teams can’t see – nor easily resolve – overly permissioned files, the average organization has more than 802,000 data files at risk due to oversharing. This figure is accelerating year-over-year by 34%.

A recent report revealed the staggering scale of the problem with 91% of employees still having access to company files since offboarding. The financial impact is also alarming, with the average cost per insider incident reaching $16.2 million. These issues stem from multiple factors including the proliferation of shadow IT, inability to control excessive or unrevoked access, shared credentials, and complex organizational changes from mergers, acquisitions, and restructuring.

The stakes have never been higher as AI exponentially amplifies the problem. While files buried deep within directory structures may be challenging for users to locate, large language models (LLMs) can surface sensitive data to users with inappropriate permissions in seconds. Analysts estimate that 80% of organizations seeking to scale their digital business will fail without modern data governance.

Symphony now identifies and remediates anomalous permissions across entire file system estates regardless of the underlying infrastructure, providing full visibility into who can access what and enabling fast resolution of problematic access. The platform enables automated detection and mass permission changes, eliminating the need to deploy another limited toolset while reducing tool sprawl that creates IT friction and operational budget pressures.

Beyond ACL remediation, Symphony provides the ability to apply custom metadata to files, enabling advanced policy automation and fueling AI pipelines based on file attributes without content scanning. Support has been extended to Windows Alternate Data Streams (ADS) and Extended Attributes (EA) for greater visibility and automation.

Symphony provides actionable metadata insights, automating data movement between file systems, object stores, and cloud storage for petabyte-scale data orchestration, storage cost optimization, and AI workload placement. The platform uses and preserves metadata during data movement while simultaneously addressing challenges in permission hygiene and compliance – crucial for preparing the data landscape for AI initiatives.

It ensures organizations are always audit-ready and compliant with regulations like GDPR, CCPA, SOX, and HIPAA. Unlike solutions that merely provide a global namespace without true access governance, Symphony orchestrates and optimizes file and object data across any infrastructure while ensuring data quality, accessibility, and proper categorization, delivering proactive security and compliance with clean, well-governed data.

Features and Capabilities for Better Data Control

In complex enterprise environments, managing file permissions – including Discretionary Access Control Lists (DACLs) and System Access Control Lists (SACLs) – has become a challenge for IT administrators and security teams. The core problems are orphaned files from deleted users, overly permissive ACLs, broken inheritance, and shadow IT. These issues create security risks, trigger compliance violations, and undermine operational efficiency.

This latest Symphony release addresses challenges like broken permission inheritance, over-privileged access, and compliance blind spots. By adding rich metadata that can later be interpreted – including ownership and comprehensive ACLs – across the entire data environment, Symphony brings much-needed structure to unstructured data, offering a level of fine-grained control and automation often missing in legacy data movers.