As
organizations are increasingly using hosted SharePoint farms, SP sites
or SharePoint Online for regulated and sensitive data incorporating PII
or Personally Identifiable Information, customer financial data,
healthcare information as well as intellectual property, data security
has become a thing of high priority. Along with this, organizations also
have to combat expensive compliance risks that revolve around regulated
data and Sharepoint. Certain compliance or security risks associated
with SharePoint environments can have grave impacts on organizations, if
they are left unattended. Security breaches, irrespective of the means
which cause them, can lead to fines, brand damage, loss of customer
trust along with other serious effects. Let us discuss 12 of the
commonly occurring security risks and ways to avoid them.
- Lack of awareness regarding SharePoint content: Governance guidelines should be implemented and content classification should be provided. This involves execution of periodic content scans coupled with providing training to end users. Along with this, SP metadata as well as work-flows should be used by teams for routing sensitive information to safe locations.
- Collaboration barriers: There are a number of users who regularly copy confidential or sensitive data from SP to their hard drive or to a USB drive, for, say, emailing it to some other person. In most cases, the aim of this copying is to facilitate information sharing with a person lacking access to SP documents. Hence businesses need to enforce clear policies regarding information-sharing, followed by access monitoring and enforcement of policy compliance.
- Not securing SharePoint from privileged insider accounts: Privilege levels with respect to administrator accounts should be limited, followed by deployment of third-party security solutions for enabling encryption as well as access control.
- Non-existent or deficient audit trails for SP usage or administrative access: For all the administrative alteration made to Sharepoint and also with respect to system or file access, it is advisable to enable auditing.
- Lack of content security in SP servers, in transits or endpoints: Companies need to implement solutions which offer content security on SP servers and on backups by means of encryption as well as access control. Along with this, teams should take into account whole-disk encryption with regards to end-points, particularly laptops. SSL encryption can also be enabled by security administrators through data in transit.
- Misconfiguration of permissions or access controls: First, existing SP permissions need to be audited, followed by review or creation of control policies relating to corporate access. It is good to line up SP permissions along with corporate directory services. With this, administrators would be able to comprehend the use of inheritance as well as improperly managed item-level permissions.
- SP platform security risks: You should harden platforms through disablement of services or ports that are not required for the platform function. Moreover, patch on a regular basis and take into consideration application white listing.
- SharePoint and Malware: A server malware solution should be implemented, updating the antivirus definitions on a regular basis.
- Failure to set limitation on service and administrator accounts: It is advisable to set limitations on privileges relating to service accounts as well as go for disablement of the install account. Also do not make use of shared administrator accounts.
- SP network configuration and system architecture issues: Putting a dedicated SP web front end within a DMZ, make use of a single function with respect to each server and harden SP, database as well as OS in accordance with the best practices.
- Setbacks in executing backups, and in providing DR capability: On a regular basis, backups need to be performed and the same need to be restored. Then the means of recovery from disasters with the help of SharePoint services should be considered.
- Improper search indexing: Often to obtain search results, administrators leverage an admin account, which leads to results that are not relevant for everyone. To avoid this, administrative accounts should not be unnecessarily used for operations wherein they are not required.
Management
of all the above-mentioned security risks by implementing proper
security controls help a lot in mitigating compliance and content
security risks in SharePoint. Moreover, putting the SP environment
across a robust security footing enables you to widen the scope of
SharePoint use within your organization for enhanced communication or
collaboration. You can hire developers from top SharePoint application development companies in India who can help you build products within allocated budgets and time schedules.
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