Security and Compliance Risks in Sharepoint Environment and How They can be Managed

Managing the business risks effectively and attaining regulatory compliance are some of the greatest challenges that enterprises face today. With increased pressure to comply with the mandates, regulations and standards that are designed to protect against a wide range of risks that span the industries, governments and geographies, website owners have to be even more careful.

Yet some organizations still treat risk management and compliance as responsibilities that only introduce new cost burdens and complexity. The constant anxiety and outright confusion is not uncommon. Despite large investments in this section, executives believe that organizations have inadequately addressed the processes that deal with risks, security and compliance.

With organizations using on premises SharePoint sites, SharePoint Online and hosted SharePoint farms for sensitive and regulated data, securing the data is a high priority. Many organizations face compliance risks that are associated with the regulated data and some of the most common security risk may even be found in the SharePoint environment, which can have serious consequences for the organizations if they are not taken care of.

Here in this blog we will discuss some of the most common SharePoint development security risks and important tips on how to mitigate them:

Failing to secure the content in the SharePoint Servers on endpoints or in transit:

It is very important that organizations should always secure the content on SharePoint servers and also on backups through proper encryption methods and controlled access. In addition to this, the teams should also consider whole disk encryption from endpoints and the security admins can also use the SSL encryption technique for the data in transit.

Misconfiguring the permissions and access controls:

One most important thing that the SharePoint developers should consider is to audit the existing SharePoint permissions and then review or develop the corporate access control policies. They should then align the SharePoint permissions with corporate directory services and it is by doing this that the administers can easily understand the usage of inheritance and also identify the unmanaged item level permissions.

Lack of content awareness:

Organizations should implement governance guidelines and standards and offer content classification. This includes providing training to the end users and performing the periodic content scans. In addition to this, the teams should use SharePoint metadata and workflows to store sensitive data and other information in secured locations. This will help them to reduce the security risk and manage important data efficiently.

Proper validation after SharePoint migration:

Validating the migrated content is essential as soon as the process is done in order to ensure that timely recovery of data would be possible in case of any issues and that nothing is lost during the migration process.

·         Customization: Business owners should always tally all the templates, setting and permission and other customisations of the source site with the destination site.

·         Optimisations:  Once the migrate phase is done, you need to optimise it according to how the users want to use it and the requirements that are exclusive to the organization’s needs

·         Monitoring: At times, unmonitored applications are some of the most important contributors to migration failures and this can often lead to huge security holes and also threaten for major breaches. It is essential to monitor them to ensure overall wellbeing of the SharePoint website.

Failure to perform backups:

Another most important thing to consider is to perform the backups and also test and restore them regularly. You also need to consider how to recover from any SharePoint service disasters to save your important website data.