Managing Zones

CTERA Portal provides enterprises with a global file system, integrating branch office and cloud file services under a global namespace. The global namespace is the content of all folders and subfolders that are in a team portal.

CTERA Zones enable the global file system to be segmented into logical units. Only the relevant subset of the namespace is accessible by each edge location. This means that each edge location is separated from every other edge location in the enterprise, enabling privacy and security between locations, preventing internal data leakage between groups and also ensuring data sovereignty compliance.

Zones are defined at the team portal level for edge filers connected to the portal. Once defined, the edge filer has no access to any folder in the portal that is not defined as belonging to that zone. When content is required by more than one location, the relevant folders can belong to more than one zone.

Any edge filer that is connected to a portal with zones defined for it, is automatically associated with the default zone. An edge filer can be associated with more than one zone. In this case the edge filer will sync folders from every zone it is associated with. More than one zone can be associated with a single edge filer. All the folders defined for all the zones are synced with the edge filer. Also, more than one edge filer can be associated with a zone.

If the portal is licensed for antivirus functionality and the default provisioned plan in the global administration includes the antivirus service and the service is enabled, the navigation pane includes a Services option.

After the global administrator has enabled zones, the navigation pane includes a Compliance option and the Zones item is displayed under this option.

Defining a Zone

The Zones feature is available for every team portal, after zones are enabled by a global administrator.

Some countries have strict rules about where data is stored. In cases like this, a zone can be defined for that country so that all the data from the global namespace that has to be restricted to the country is accessible via edge filers in the country.

Different departments in a company do not need to be overloaded with files from other departments that they never need. With an edge filer used the content required by each department and zones defined for each department edge filer, users have access to their data and are not overloaded with unwanted content from other departments. In addition, there is the extra security consideration that users cannot access sensitive content belonging to another department, such as human resources. Even if all the edge location content is accessed from a single edge filer, by creating multiple zones associated with this edge filer, you can separate the content on the edge filer in to logical units.

All zone actions are logged in the audit log.