Modern enterprises increasingly rely on cloud collaboration to enhance business productivity, efficiency, and communication. While these cloud-based solutions offer numerous benefits, they also pose a range of security risks. Among these risks, enterprise SharePoint security concerns are some of the most significant. It is essential to adopt best practices that can mitigate these risks and safeguard your organization’s valuable data and assets.
Top SharePoint Security Concerns
Let’s examine the top security concerns surrounding SharePoint and explore effective strategies to tackle them to keep your data and collaboration safe and secure.
Data Breaches
It’s not surprising that data loss or breaches top this list. Any data breach can be disastrous for a company or, at the very least, result in significant financial damage. New data regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU and similar privacy laws in other countries, have serious repercussions for non-compliance. To prevent a data breach, security and IT departments must implement multiple controls, ensure data is encrypted at rest, and maintain a clear, rapid response plan in the event of a breach.
A data loss response plan is based on two critical things: disclosure and threat mitigation. You must be prepared to notify both customers and federal authorities about data breaches, but more importantly, you need mechanisms in place to prevent data loss in the first place. There are many approaches to mitigate SharePoint security risks, including identity and access management, file-level protection, and data restoration plans. Ensure you have adequate protections in place to prevent and identify data loss.
Unauthorized Access
Unauthorized access is a common security issue in SharePoint and can take several forms.
- Employee Access – Negligent and malicious insiders pose one of the most sigminimizednificant risks to your SharePoint data, from the employee who mistakenly sends a sensitive file to the wrong recipient, a disgruntled employee stealing a client list before they leave for a job elsewhere, to an individual who joins your company to gain access to intellectual property for a third party. Ensuring your employees can only access the data they need to perform their jobs and having controls in place to restrict access to sensitive data are essential to SharePoint security.
- Guest Access / Third Party Access – Collaboration is no longer limited to the confines of your network. SharePoint lets you quickly and easily share documents with people outside your organization. While great for collaboration, guest access introduces several SharePoint security risks, including oversharing, accidental sharing, data loss and credential theft. It’s essential to control what guest users can access and share to mitigate threats.
- Overprivileged Access – Overprivileged access occurs when a user is granted more permissions than necessary to access systems, applications, or data. This often leads to privilege abuse, in which an individual with elevated access rights, such as an administrator, exploits those privileges for malicious purposes. It is important to be mindful of these issues and implement measures to prevent overprivileging, ensuring the security of your systems and data.
- Compromised Accounts – Attackers are routinely targeting employee accounts to bypass increasingly robust perimeter security measures. Phishing and social engineering attacks aim to steal user credentials, particularly those of privileged users, to bypass security controls and access sensitive systems and data. Implementing multi‑factor authentication (MFA), as it requires multiple forms of verification, and ensuring users choose strong passwords, are critical to protecting accounts. Additionally, monitoring suspicious activity and limiting all accounts to need-to-know information and encryption can help reduce the impact of a breach caused by a compromised account.
- APIs – The availability and security of the services depend on the security of those APIs. Suppose an API isn’t designed with security controls such as access control, activity monitoring, and encryption. This creates a significant security concern for all SharePoint services that rely on those APIs. Regular testing of all API functionality, or when your company expands an existing API-based service or introduces a new one, will help ensure that any API misuse is kept to a minimum.
Misconfiguration
Security concerns in SharePoint can also stem from improper configuration. Most affected are customers of PaaS (Platform as a service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a service), with the majority of the issues coming from the following:
- Disabled data encryption
- No identity access management
- Passwords that are not strong enough
- No permissions controls whatsoever
- Lack of policy awareness or insufficient policies
If the setup isn’t done correctly, the risk of a security issue on your SharePoint site increases exponentially. Evaluating on-demand services is important to ensure those potential loopholes are adequately sealed.
Patching & Update Management
Attackers commonly exploit software vulnerabilities to infiltrate systems and applications. Failing to install patches and updates can leave your systems exposed. Ensure you have a robust vulnerability management process in place and are running the most up-to-date version of SharePoint to mitigate exposure.
Auditing
Maintaining a record of all actions taken within the system and with sensitive data is crucial to ensure compliance and trace the source of any problem. Auditing within SharePoint is designed for this purpose and enables you to view all activities. However, many companies fail to activate or set up auditing properly from the start.
Malware & Ransomware
Malware is designed to damage, disrupt or gain access to systems, servers and networks. Ransomware encrypts data and demands payment from victims to regain access to their systems and data. Either one of these can be extremely damaging to a business. Since SharePoint content can be created and shared anywhere, including outside the organization’s systems, malware or ransomware can easily be introduced and corrupt your system and data. Patching, backups and limiting data access can help mitigate the damage of an attack.
Implementing SharePoint Security Best Practices
As you’ve just read, SharePoint security can be compromised by factors such as unauthorized access, poorly configured APIs, incorrectly deployed SharePoint sites, phishing and malware, and a lack of regular SharePoint audits. To mitigate these security concerns, organizations can take several actions, including:
- Periodically reviewing SharePoint configurations. To address potential issues, IT and security teams must perform these actions frequently enough to mitigate concerns.
- Classifying and labelling sensitive data. You need to know where your sensitive data is and then label it accordingly. Whether you’re using Microsoft Purview sensitivity and a third-party tool to classify data, it’s essential to ensure your data is categorized properly. Classifications can then be used to apply additional protections based on the data’s sensitivity, including encryption, watermarks, and other file-level controls.
- Implementing robust access management controls. Role-based access control is a good start, but it has limitations, especially when security posture needs to be considered. Employing more fine-grained attribute-based access control (ABAC) policies considers the user’s posture and the environment (device, location, network, etc.) relative to the sensitivity of the data. Decisions are made in real time to approve or deny access, or to provide restrictions, based on the scenario.
- Automating data protection policies. Controlling access is an important first step, but you also need to govern how users can access and use that information, and with whom they can share sensitive information. Automated data protection policies can prevent data loss and misuse by applying encryption, enforcing read-only access, and prohibiting copying, downloading, or sharing of sensitive data.
- Applying external sharing and guest access controls. Access control policies can also control what information guests can access and how they can interact with files. For example, deny guests access to any information labeled ‘sensitive’ or present guests with the information in a Secure Viewer app that provides read-only access and removes the ability to print, copy, or download the file.
- Restricting sensitive data access on BYOD devices. Accessing information on the go is valuable for productivity, so simply blocking BYOD access may not be a practical solution. Instead, restrict how users can interact with data on BYOD devices. For example, limit BYOD users to read-only access and prevent downloading sensitive files.
- Watermarking sensitive documents. Stamping ‘confidential’ across a document is not sufficient in the event of data misuse. Instead, add the handler’s information, the access date and time, and related details to remind users of the file’s sensitivity and to track the chain of custody.
- Using malware protection and file integrity checks. Scan files for malware and viruses before uploading them to SharePoint and block or quarantine them to prevent malicious code from entering and spreading through the system.
- Logging all user actions taken with data. This should include who accessed the file and any file actions, such as editing, printing, or sharing, to support compliance auditing and reporting. This will also help in the event of a security incident investigation.
- Analyzing data telemetry in your SIEM. Ensure your third-party tools can share data logs with your SIEM for further analysis and to trigger downstream actions and alerts if suspicious activity is detected.
Augmenting SharePoint Security Tools
archTIS’s complementary products for Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) and Data Access Governance (DAG) can help augment and automate SharePoint security best practices across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
Improve Data Discovery and Classification
archTIS’ Spirion Sensitive Data Platform (SDP) empowers organizations to overcome key challenges when using Microsoft Purview. By adding Spirion to Purview’s data security infrastructure, your team gains:
- Reduced false positives that eliminate alert fatigue, allowing focused, actionable responses
- Expanded discovery across all environments, from cloud to local servers
- Advanced classification options for structured data management
Add Fine-grained Data Access and Protection
archTIS’ NC Protect adds policy-enforced data-centric security to secure your SharePoint collaboration more precisely.
- Dynamic ABAC policies utilize both data and user attributes from Microsoft Purview, Entra ID, SharePoint properties, and other classification sources to determine access rights and apply file protection in real time.
- Augment native security features to protect Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, OCR, CAD files, images, text files and more.
- Dynamically enforces secure read-only access, hides sensitive files from unauthorized users, and applies user-based security watermarks.
