As SharePoint offers robust collaborative features, organizations utilize it to store, organize, share, and access information across devices from anywhere. However, its changes to content and configurations may make keeping track of changes challenging.
Why is it Important to Prioritize SharePoint Security?
Businesses often store sensitive data on SharePoint due to its collaborative capabilities and user-friendliness; as a result, security must remain a priority. As each SharePoint Online site requires individual policies, workflows, and permissions that differ significantly, their infrastructure can become complex. Users have access to data they shouldn't be accessing if permissions accidentally granted or compromised are compromised - to protect content while adhering to compliance laws, SharePoint permissions and content must undergo regular auditing processes.
Read More: Maximizing User Experience on Modern SharePoint Sites: What's the Cost of Ignoring It?
The Best Methods for Securing SharePoint
Following these helpful recommendations will assist in increasing the overall security of your SharePoint environment.
Share Permissions
Protect Content Shared with External Users: SharePoint's collaboration features often necessitate that users share information with external parties. When this occurs, the security of this information must take precedence; generally speaking, external sharing should be avoided and only allowed where necessary for business operations. Organizing all external sharing sites into one site collection is recommended to increase control and visibility over external sharing activities.
By taking these measures, you can ensure your sensitive data remains free from unwarranted access and privilege abuse. Reduce risk by sharing externally using distinct site collections; train staff on sharing content externally.
Disable Anonymous Sharing: Your users have various options for quickly and anonymously sharing content, given many companies prohibit email attachments. As alternatives such as Dropbox or Google Drive may allow anonymous sharing without infringing upon company policy, users might use these sharing platforms instead; SharePoint even supports anonymous sharing as long as this feature can be turned off this may help manage what information users share without your knowledge and ensure you have documentation needed in case of a data breach investigation.
User Management Groups
Permissions may be assigned individually or through security groups; both methods offer their own set of benefits when controlling access and authorizing users. Individually assigning permissions provides more control, though managing this method requires greater effort; by contrast, security groups make managing permission assignments far simpler, though it could potentially lead to over-privileged users if mismanaged incorrectly.
Groups allow permissions to be assigned in such a way as to adhere to the principle of least privilege, so users who switch roles within your organization or leave can quickly have their permissions removed by simply un-listing themselves from security groups; user-level permissions tend to go ignored so are seldom revisited later on.
Item Level Permissions Should Be Canceled
SharePoint needs to provide an intuitive method of tracking permissions more straightforwardly as File Server does. Although granting item-level permission may appear like an easy and practical way to grant access, it can quickly lead to unsafe conditions resulting in compromised environments; accordingly, it's better to exercise discretion when assigning permissions at this level.
Try assigning permissions using libraries or folders rather than item-level permissions when assigning access privileges; this will simplify managing access privileges, reduce broken inheritance risks, and decrease potential attack surfaces.
One Administrator for Each Site or Group of Sites
As previously discussed, groups can be formed, and administrators can be assigned to oversee all group activities. One administrator holds ultimate accountability for sharing within their group as they are the only person responsible.
Utilize Microsoft's Built-In Security Features
Microsoft provides several built-in security features designed to strengthen the protection of your account, including virus detection and encryption services. These are particularly beneficial.
- Encryption: Microsoft environment features various levels of protection, from network and application security to data center security and access control measures.
- At Rest Encryption: In-Transit Encryption and Per-File Encryption are two stages of encryption. When data enters or exits data centers, in-transit encryption is applied. In contrast, two forms of data-at-rest encryption include BitLocker disk-level protection and per-file customer content protection available via SharePoint platforms online.
- Virus detection: SharePoint Online's virus detection capability is another strong asset of SharePoint Online, typically conducted automatically and via an anti-virus engine, scanning all content for viruses or malware using advanced anti-virus algorithms. While SharePoint Online virus detection works effectively, sometimes its scope may be restricted as its scan engine cannot process files larger than 25MB offline. Therefore, installing separate anti-virus detection software is vital as protection against larger files is often necessary, as SharePoint cannot scan larger files effectively.
Examine SharePoint for Modifications and View Events
Given SharePoint is such an adaptable platform, its configuration cannot simply be ignored after it has been completed. To quickly detect problems that could result in security breaches and interruption of business operations, audit all activity within SharePoint, including service modifications, server hardware/virtual hardware configuration settings, or security settings. A third-party monitoring tool Auditor for SharePoint will help maximize built-in threat detection/response features to provide optimal threat identification/response capabilities and minimize disruptions to business operations.
Review Access Rights Frequently
SharePoint is an insidious collaboration tool; issues often only become evident after data breaches. Maintaining security and regulatory compliance within SharePoint environments becomes much simpler when modifications to user profiles, permissions, and configurations can be easily reported. Regular auditing must occur to detect anything that might lead to data breaches or outages; failing this, maintaining compliance will become much harder and may lead to breaches or outages that lead to security or regulatory violations.
Sort the Data You Keep in SharePoint by Class
Businesses generally understand the necessity of data classification to manage how private and sensitive information is utilized per industry/government regulations and internal security guidelines.
Sensitive data can be identified using data loss prevention (DLP) technology and then blocked or granted access by your policies. DLP allows you to inspect content, metadata, and location before applying security policies created to safeguard it - integrated across Microsoft 365 services, particularly SharePoint. Still, an outside solution such as data classification software will likely be necessary to secure sensitive content on-premises SharePoint environments.
Examine User Behavior
The Management Activity API can be utilized to analyze user activity in SharePoint. Although manual analysis of this data may be possible in larger organizations, security tools provide more efficient analysis by automatically detecting unusual behavior patterns within regular user activities. Event tracers help monitor both regular users and administrators continuously. A key part of SharePoint Compliance Management involves monitoring both types of users.
Don't Name Too Many Administrators
Administrators (Admins) of SharePoint have greater authority than other users within its environment, making their selection an essential security choice. Verify that each new administrator you appoint understands their obligations as an admin and your trust for them, and reduce the number of administrators appointed while keeping a close watch over those already appointed to ensure maximum protection of SharePoint environments.
Regulate The Sharing of External Data
Be careful not to share any sensitive information when using SharePoint to share information with partners from other businesses. Hackers stole private data from a third-party vendor, leading to the well-known Target data breach that happened in November 2013. Keep in mind that you cannot ensure the security of external partners' environments when you share sensitive data with them. You can invite external users to view content in SharePoint Online by using the External Sharing feature. This feature should ideally be turned off by default and only enabled when absolutely required.
Employ Personalized Permission Levels
Users shouldn't be permitted to edit, delete, or create items, even though there are situations when it's necessary to allow them to view sensitive data. Customize SharePoint permissions to limit users' access to specific data.SharePoint Groups can have permissions assigned to them collectively, or you can give permissions to each user separately. Permission levels should be carefully controlled to help avoid scenarios where users unintentionally erase or replace crucial data.
Conclusion
At your organization, it is critical that you carefully consider and implement a SharePoint security strategy to mitigate security risks and data breaches. A key rule should be restricting access to sensitive information by those who genuinely require it; malicious acts should also be monitored using SharePoint permissions while keeping an eye on user and admin activity.
