Why you Need to Manage User Permissions in Microsoft 365

It has never been more critical for organisations to keep Microsoft 365 workspaces secure. 

With the increase in remote working and demand for greater collaboration surrounding Microsoft 365 workspaces, it can be challenging for businesses to track user activity, audit permissions, and prevent unauthorised access to sensitive content across the organisation.

You know managing and reporting user permissions across Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Sites, and Microsoft 365 Groups is important, yet it can also be a time-consuming, tedious and complex task that is not always top of the agenda.

The Risk of Doing Nothing 

With increasing requests from colleagues – many now working remotely – to provide third parties with guest access to internal content across your Microsoft 365 workspaces, such as Teams and SharePoint Online, in order to collaborate productively, the risk of data breaches also rises on a daily basis.

With more employees at home, it can be easy to forget to remove users who no longer work for your organisation and no longer exist in your Active Directory (AD). If these users’ permissions are not removed from the Admin Centre, they could still have access to your environment, which presents a risky situation for the security of your sensitive files.

And without insight into user permissions – basically who can see what content – it’s nearly impossible to ensure that your data is effectively protected and your security policies are enforced. 

User Permissions Governance 

Without proper permissions governance in place, a variety of mismanagements can happen. For example, a user could create a Microsoft Team or a SharePoint Group and forget to assign any permissions to that workspace. If this situation occurs, an entire set of users who should have access to certain files and content via that workspace, suddenly do not. And it is difficult to locate Teams and Groups without permissions in order to either assign user permissions to them or delete them entirely.

Keep it Clean 

Another similar issue is around Teams, Groups and members. A user can create a Team or a Group and then not add any members. Not a big deal in itself, but if this situation keeps occurring, you could suddenly find yourself with lots of workspaces without members, which are effectively workspaces that are not used, which in turn equates to clutter.

These inactive Teams and Groups need to be identified and either removed or have users added to them. In large environments, finding these workspaces to cut the clutter can be a major challenge.

Don’t Get Left in the Dark 

In this collaborative world, in order to protect workspaces and prevent security breaches, it’s paramount to identify every single user who has permissions to your content.

Armed with this greater visibility, only then can you discover, control and secure all aspects of user permissions while improving organisational policy compliance.

ProvisionPoint Permissions provides a comprehensive overview of all Microsoft 365 user permissions from a single console to rapidly identify, track, and audit user permissions across your Microsoft 365 tenant. Authorised users can discover any changes to permissions and action any issues immediately, keeping workspaces fully secure.

Kickstart your User Permissions Mission

Interested in learning more about managing user permissions in Microsoft 365? Why not book a demo and see the power of ProvisionPoint Permissions for yourself.