Implications and benefits of removing NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM from sysadmin role?

Posted by Cade Roux on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Cade Roux
Published on 2010-04-09T14:34:20Z Indexed on 2010/04/09 14:43 UTC
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sql-server

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security

Disclaimer: I am not a DBA. I am a database developer.

A DBA just sent a report to our data stewards and is planning to remove the NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM account from the sysadmin role on a bunch of servers. (The probably violate some audit report they received).

I see a MSKB article that says not to do this.

From what I can tell reading a variety of disparate information on the web, a bunch of special services/operations (Volume Copy, Full Text Indexing, MOM, Windows Update) use this account even when the SQL Server and Agent service etc are all running under dedicated accounts.

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