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On Lockdown

HMV/Waterstone’s asserts control over user activity.

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Customer: HMV/Waterstone’s, part of the HMV Group Headquarters: Marlow, England Business: Retail distributor of physical and digital entertainment products and live-entertainment organizer Challenge: Ensuring internal users can’t access unauthorized user profiles and system resources Solution: Deploying Safestone’s DetectIT to granularly control who can access which parts of the company’s systems Software: DetectIT from Safestone Hardware: Several IBM System i, iSeries and Power Systems boxes, as well as an IBM BladeCenter solution

When many people think IT security, they picture malevolent hackers, or crackers, breaking into a system and stealing confidential data. But security encompasses much more than that, including internal unauthorized access to data or alterations to files or applications—purposeful or not.

For these reasons, it’s important for organizations to lock down their systems so only personnel with the proper authorization can look at or alter data and system resources. Without safeguards, anyone with access to a networked workstation can quickly muck up the works even without nefarious intentions.

One company that’s taken this form of security seriously is HMV/Waterstone’s, part of the larger HMV Group. Because it has so many user profiles—more than 40,000—and strict self-imposed and external auditing requirements, it felt it had to implement both proactive and reactive security measures.

So HMV/Waterstone’s reached out to Safestone Technologies, a specialist in compliance and information-security standards, and its DetectIT security software. With this solution deployed, the company has much better control over who can see and touch what. “We had some policies previously in place, but since having implemented DetectIT, we feel much more secure,” says Derek Walklate, head of service management, HMV Group.

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