SharePoint^® Compliance Management

Reduce Security Risks in Your SharePoint Environment

SharePoint has become one of the most popular and fastest-growing products ever shipped by Microsoft^®. It’s designed to be easy to deploy and manage without significant IT involvement or expertise.

That’s the good news…the bad news is that the ease and convenience of SharePoint can create a security nightmare, especially if sensitive data winds up on the wrong site.

SharePoint Identity and Access Concerns

SharePoint is powerful, flexible and easy to implement, but it has a limited security and governance model. Given the popularity of SharePoint, system administrators and security and compliance personnel have some thorny questions they need to answer:

• What SharePoint sites are on our servers and who owns them?
• Who has access to these sites and what permission levels do they have?
• Are sites with sensitive data being managed using best practices consistent with the organization’s access policies?
• How can I remediate sites that are exposing the organization to risk?

Managing risk is all about identifying situations where information may be vulnerable to exposure. In the SharePoint environment, this means pinpointing sites that may be in violation of corporate access policies or best practices and evaluating the potential downside of an unintended data breach.

Because SharePoint is so commonly available, it is not uncommon for enterprises to find SharePoint sites with sensitive data and user accounts with inappropriate access rights to that data. Identifying users who have these accesss rights can be very difficult to do without support of an automated tool, especially in environments with many SharePoint sites.

What IT managers, SharePoint administrators and security/audit personnel need is a tool that will enable them to locate SharePoint sites, identify their users and provide guidance regarding industry best practices for managing access rights to data stored in SharePoint. This is difficult to do manually, since few SharePoint discovery tools can locate previously unknown sites and examine SharePoint user and group permission levels to uncover individuals who may have inappropriate access to sensitive data.

Correct deficiencies – provide managers with the information they require to quickly and effectively remediate inappropriate permission levels.

Protect Your SharePoint Sites

Courion, leaders in access governance, provisioning and compliance, has responded to customers’ needs by producing Compliance Manager for SharePoint, which gives IT managers the tools to analyze, evaluate and manage an organization’s exposure to risk as a result of inadequate SharePoint governance.

The solution enables system administrators to identify and reduce risk by highlighting sites that are not in compliance with security policy or industry best practices and enabling the system administrators to bring the sites into compliance by remediating inappropriate access. Administrators can use Compliance Manager for SharePoint to regularly monitor SharePoint sites, ensure users aren’t opening security holes and demonstrate compliance with corporate policy to management and auditors.

Compliance Manager for SharePoint can scan a server and identify all the SharePoint sites on the server. For each site, the solution identifies all users and domain groups and their associated permission levels on the site. The software then provides the administrator with graphs and detailed reports which highlight sites that are in violation of corporate security policy or best practices, giving them the information they need to identify the best approach to remediating those violations.

For more detailed information or to download a free trial offer visit the Compliance Manager for SharePoint page.