Who in Your Company Should Have an Administrator Account?

Based on their roles within your company, your employees will either have an ordinary user account or an administrator account. This can be one of the most stressful parts of managing a network because the answer for who gets administrator access isn’t always clear. What an administrator account is and why it’s imperative to have restraint when looking at who should have an admin account is explained below.

Why is an Admin Account So Important?
An administrator account is essentially the highest level of privilege that you can give to someone on your network. Compared to the traditional user account, an admin account can do much, much more; and this isn’t necessarily a good thing. Keeping more traditional accounts than administrator accounts is a best practice because it reduces risk to your network. This keeps an ordinary user from making dramatic changes to a network, like installing software or moving important files around.

Admin accounts can execute just about any action they want on a computer. Think of it as the way IT accesses a computer, as they require these permissions to apply updates and administer general maintenance. Every computer needs to have at least one admin account on it, but untrained users should not have admin permissions; this could result in file changes that prevent the computer from working as intended.

Why You Need to Restrict Admin Account Use
It may make sense to have admin permissions for your own computer account, but it’s actually not in your best interest. There are significant security problems that come from using an admin account as your primary device account. If the device is compromised in some way, the account could implement malware with administrator privileges or make changes to critical files. Even if you think you’ll need the extra privileges, we assure you that you don’t in almost any circumstance; the security risk isn’t worth it.

Standard accounts will usually have more restricted permissions, which means that a compromised account will only yield certain permissions, not the entirety of the computer. This is why we suggest limiting administrator accounts only to whoever is in charge of IT.

If your organization needs someone to manage its IT solutions, Macro Systems can help! To learn more, reach out to us at 703-359-9211.