https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/news/366626932/Panzura-Symphony-conducts-automated-user-data-permissions
Panzura is adding more automation capabilities to its Symphony data management software around access permissions and metadata.
These additions look to proactively stop a common security issue of permissive data access by culling and controlling user access lists, according to Panzura representatives. The Symphony software will also expand support for third-party storage systems including those from NetApp and IBM.
Managing permissions is a known issue for enterprise IT, said Simon Robinson, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia.
"They're closing a pretty well-understood loophole in enterprise IT, but managing this in a scalable way is a challenge," he said.
Panzura Symphony is built on the technology of Moonwalk Universal, a vendor acquired by Panzura last July. Symphony is sold in two versions and priced by the total amount of data under management. These new features are included at no additional cost and are generally available today.
The Symphony software can now automatically review a customer's access control list to ensure that authorized users can access files they're entitled to exclusively.
Access permissions can accidentally bloat over time in an enterprise, said Mike Harvey, senior vice president of technology at Panzura and co-founder of Moonwalk. As more AI initiatives have kicked off within enterprises, customers have found data being ingested into these models and systems due to lax privilege management. Concerns about data access can then slow down AI development and adoption.
"A lot of customers' AI initiatives paused or stalled because they have a permission challenge," Harvey said.
Connections to the access control list within Symphony are supported by ACL analysis software for administrators that drills down into inheritance lineage, database exports and other capabilities, according to Panzura.
New repair capabilities fix broken ACL inheritance for discretionary access control lists and system access control lists. Repaired connections maintain permission histories for logging and tracking, the vendor said. These automated repair policies can be defined and also permissioned by administrators.
Bringing automation to proactively cull permissions ahead of issues that might arise, like leaving vulnerable data exposed, is a common challenge facing security and storage teams that Symphony could solve, said Jerome Wendt, CEO and principal analyst at Data Center Intelligence Group.
"If one link is broken, it wouldn't surprise me if there are others with the same vulnerability in the environment," Wendt said. "Who really has time or the ability to check all those things?"
Support for metadata services and external storage system connections has also been expanded from Symphony's existing metadata tagging features, using Windows Alternate Data Streams and Extended Attributes, according to Panzura.
Symphony now supports NetApp FlexGroup volumes, enabling support for NetApp's NAS storage offerings, and IBM Storage Deep Archive for backup management.
Panzura's plans to continue supporting competitor storage platforms in Symphony beyond its own CloudFS software-defined storage are vital if it wants Symphony to see greater adoption, Wendt said.
Panzura has previously stated that it plans to keep the Symphony software independent of CloudFS, and early support for these popular enterprise platforms is a good sign, he said.
"They're taking the right approach," Wendt said. "You're not going to pull out these other NAS solutions for CloudFS unless you have a pretty compelling reason to do that."
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for Informa TechTarget covering cloud and data storage.
01 Jul 2025