Data security has become a concern in the modern IT sector. Apart from the data breaches, be careful about accidental and intentional data loss and data deletion.
Since SharePoint team sites store sensitive data, you need to secure it against any internal or external threats. In this article, we will share some tips for securing SharePoint team sites that work.
1. Assign One Admin Per Team Site
One mistake that often leads to data loss is making multiple people the admin of a team site. If you make five admins, how will you know who is responsible for site deletion or unauthorized sharing? To avoid such issues, make sure one team site has a single admin.
This method won’t only reduce the chance of data leaks, but it’ll also limit the people with complete access to the SharePoint website or site group.
2. Whitelist Specific IPs and Locations
While blacklisting an annoying number might work for your phone, in the case of SharePoint team site data, it has to be whitelisting. You may not know the IP and location of the criminals, but you surely know your own location and IP. You need to designate approval for the IP from where you and your team access the SharePoint team site.
Implementing this method might not be the best idea if you have a remote team working from distributed locations. However, you can always whitelist designated locations to reduce the chance of data breach to the minimum.
3. Enable Automatic Data Retention Process
Data loss doesn’t always result from accidental data deletion. You may delete a set of data, thinking it to be unnecessary. But, later you come to know about its importance.
In such scenarios, automatic data retention can come in handy. Set a convenient data retention policy to work against unintentional deletion and other cases.
Depending on your need, you may apply label-based policies for a file, folder, or library. You can also set up a policy for the whole site.
4. Always Customize Sharing Settings
Sharing may sound like a trivial matter in the office culture, and most people don’t pay much attention to it. When it comes to the share permissions of SharePoint, it’s a different story. It lets you share an item using a single link with anyone within SharePoint.
Since it contains a vital security risk, you need to manage it while keeping all possibilities and considerations in mind. Review all the sharing permissions set on various levels and customize the necessary ones.
5. Control Site Access Permissions
If you want to strengthen the security of the SharePoint team site, you need to control who is accessing which section of it.
Sometimes, users have higher permissions than they actually need. Your SharePoint content library will be at risk if you grant too much access than actually required.
6. Enable the Documents Only for Targeted Audience
Audience targeting is a feature that lets you access content to a set of users based on their roles. Though it’s not a security feature, it ensures a team member sees what they need to see and nothing else.
This way, you can save team site data from unauthorized access. This feature is available for navigation, pages, and documents.
7. Prohibit Library Sync for Confidential Data
Do you know that syncing sensitive data to your local system makes them vulnerable to data loss? Numerous accidental data deletions happen when SharePoint users sync the doc libraries to the local computers and delete all the C: Drive data.
Moreover, you don’t even get a warning while deleting any SharePoint data from the synced local library. Disable library syncing to avoid such disastrous events and keep your team site data safe.
8. Regulate Page Editing
You might want to be careful while allowing others to edit the team site page. Since SharePoint treats its pages like other content, users with edit permission can delete documents from the library or modify the pages.
To stop these damages from happening, break inheritance and the library read-only. It’ll prevent them from editing all library pages.
If this isn’t a convenient step for you, you can also prevent them from editing a specific page. You can add editing restrictions on the critical pages only and leave the rest open for editing.
9. Use Custom Permission Levels
You may need to create a custom permission level for your SharePoint team site, despite taking other necessary measures. If the situation demands, don’t hesitate to choose a tailored permission level for any team member.
As per the default setting, visitors can only read the site data while site members can add, edit, or delete content. If you want a user to edit a document only but not to delete it, create a permission level suitable for your need. Once you set up the permission, the user will only see the options they’re allowed to perform.
10. A Foolproof Policy Against Data Leak
The data leak can happen through any simple action such as printing, sharing, and many more. To prevent data loss through these, you need to make an airtight policy against data leaks. It may lead you to prohibit actions like sharing, printing, or downloading data based on any particular criteria.
Consider all the possible pain points and create a data loss prevention policy suitable for your team. Make sure it prevents data loss, at least in the core scenarios.
11. Train Your Team on Sites Security
The last point of this list is to offer appropriate security training to all team members who use team sites. Gone are the days when only IT admins used to be concerned about data security. Now, every staff member should play their part in data protection.
You must arrange for in-depth training to make them realize the aftermath of data sync and external sharing. Also, teach them how to recover deleted items within the stipulated time. Above all, make them understand the working process of SharePoint so that they can self-monitor their actions.
Secure Team Sites Effectively
It’s essential to take precautions to safeguard SharePoint team site data. Try out these tips to minimize the prevalent risks and offer 360° security to your SharePoint team sites.
SharePoint is a powerful content management tool that also helps you with collaborative work and project management. If you keep team site's data secure, you can put your mind in things that matter instead of chasing security breaches.
