Organization and assignment of access privileges to resources in a computer network. The resources of the network are organized into a hierarchical tree structure, with each node in the tree representing a resource, resource group, or resource instance. Read and/or write permission to one or more resources may be explicitly granted to the resource or implicitly granted based upon the location of the resource in the hierarchical structure. The access rights attach to the resource(s). Upon movement of the resource within the tree structure or to an alternate tree structure, the access rights associated therewith remain with the relocated resource.