Mastering ArcGIS Enterprise Administration

Service accounts

ArcGIS Server, Portal for ArcGIS, and Data Store for ArcGIS all run as Windows services, but what exactly is a service? A service is a program that runs in the background and executes with no user interaction. Most services are typically configured to start automatically with Windows. A service account is a Windows user account that exists solely to provide a security context for a Windows service and determines the service's ability to access local and network resources. In other words, the service account that a service runs under controls what the service can and cannot access.

Esri recommends using domain-level accounts as the ArcGIS Server, Portal, and Data Store service accounts for production systems. With a domain ...