If you're using your computer to watch this video right now,
you're probably using a user account.
This is an account that's on your computer that is
associated with an individual.
This is usually behind the scenes,
associating your name with a very specific identification
number for the operating system.
Most of our modern operating systems allow multi-user,
so you can log out of the computer,
someone else can log in with their credentials,
and they would gain access to only the files and resources
that are associated to them.
This means that you can store files on the same system,
but only the authorized users would have access
to the files that belong to them.
A user account is also one that has limited access
to the operating system.
This means that the applications that you use on your user
account do not have access to the full operating
system of your computer.
And ideally, this is the account type
most people are going to use on your computer,
and it will be the account type that most
of your user community will use on a day to day basis.
A shared account, or a generic account,
is one that may be used by more than one person.
For example, many operating systems
will provide a guest account or an anonymous log
in that you could use to gain access
to that operating system.
One of the biggest challenges with using
these shared or generic accounts is
that you don't know exactly who's logging on,
and anyone who logs onto the system using
this shared or generic account would
have exactly the same access to the system as everyone
else who's logging in with that same account.
This also adds another layer of complexity
for password management.
If you change the password for shared account,
everyone who uses that shared account now
needs to be informed of the password change.
And ultimately, this could cause problems,
as people are writing down passwords and storing them
insecurely for use later.
The best practice for almost every situation
is not to use these types of accounts on your system,
and instead to have an individual account
for every person who's going to use that system.
You may not realize it, but the computer you're using probably
has some service accounts configured on it.
These are internal accounts used by the operating system
or used by services that are offered by the operating
system.
You might see service accounts being
used to run a web server or a database server.
And almost always, these accounts
are configured to be run only on the local computer.
Someone is not able to log in interactively to the operating
system using these service accounts.
When you use these service accounts
you can then set up different types of access permissions
for the different services.
For example, a web server might have access
to a certain number of files on the operating system,
and this may be very different than a database server that's
running on that same system.
Some of these service accounts don't require authentication,
but others do have a username and password.
So you'll need to define what policies
are in place to update or change these service
accounts over time.
As a system administrator you probably
have access to a privileged account.
This would be an administrator account, or root account,
depending on the operating system that you're using.
These accounts usually have complete access
to the operating system.
If you need to manage hardware, install applications,
or install device drivers, you're
probably using a privileged account to do that.
A best practice for privileged account
is to only use this account when it's needed.
During your normal day to day operations
you would use your normal user account.
Because of the access associated with this account,
you want to be sure that it's highly secured.
You would probably use multiple factors of authentication
and have constant password changes to make sure
that nobody gains access to this privileged account.