If the application doesnt (or you aren’t building the app) do enough audit, authentication and authorization, then you would have to do a proxy scenario (the proxy might do it). But to get off the shelf proxy means mostly only http apps (or build the proxy for the app – again, not pretty).

Maybe you want to control access to the share. Would putting the server on an isolated network segment work. That would provide protection, authentication and alerting.

This is all very complex, tricky and time consuming. Yuck.

Like the other guy said, the boss is asking for way more than what can be managed. This doesn’t even take into account all the manpower to review all those logs (windows sys logs. After all, you just want to know about violations, not that people are opening files all day long, right? Yikes.

And is there a policy to mandate this type of review?
Is there a process to manage (and staff to support).

Maybe what you want is strong authentication? Through in some crypto on the files; this might be a PKI. The firewall isolation noted above, with strong authentication is probably the easiest and provides a good return on ivestment, low maintenance and management efforts, decent reporting and alerting.

IT Defense