With Copilot on the horizon, there's new attention being put onto governance in your SharePoint online environment. As we've said previously, Copilot does come with its share of risks. But with appropriate controls and security policies in place, you can reduce that risk and start to safely adopt generative AI in your organization.
One of the tools in your toolkit to help secure your SharePoint Online environment is SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM). This premium add-in, offered by Microsoft, is a set of tools that help you enable more advanced settings and run advanced reports related to the security of your SharePoint environment. When activated, this add-in appears in your SharePoint admin centre, and gives you access to the following functions:
Data access governance (DAG) reports: a series of specialty reports designed to reveal gaps in access control and/or audit different levels of permissions on your SharePoint documents. Currently, these reports include assessments of any sharing links open to the entire organization and a listing of any files which have sensitivity labels applied to them. These reports can help shine a light on some hidden weaknesses that maybe lurking in your SharePoint environment.
OneDrive restrictions: the ability to lock down and control usage of the OneDrive platform, including restricting access to OneDrive content and even restricting access to the OneDrive service in general.
SharePoint site access control: additional capabilities to restrict access to SharePoint sites based on Entra security groups or based on Entra Conditional Access authentication contexts. This can help prevent accidental leakage of data from a SharePoint site that is known to hold sensitive information.
Blocking download: the ability to prevent people from downloading content from SharePoint and OneDrive
Site life cycles: the ability to set up lifecycles of sites, indicating when they are no longer needed and triggering notification to the owners for their action.
SharePoint change history reports: giving you additional insight into recent changes and the ability to create reports of the recent changes to SharePoint sites.
It's important to note that not every feature listed above is available in the SharePoint admin centre; the admin centre primarily contains the reports. You will also need to use PowerShell to access the other features, which will enable some of the more powerful governance controls offered by this tool.
SharePoint Advanced Management is an add on SKU to your Microsoft licenses and can be added through your license portal. Once active, the above features can be enabled immediately as needed to increase the control of and improve the security of the content you store in SharePoint Online.
SharePoint Advanced Management is a part of our strategy to increase security of SharePoint online and offers us some unique capabilities that are unparalleled in the marketplace. Specifically, the data access governance reports offer us key insights that we cannot obtain elsewhere but are very consequential when considering adoption of a tool such as copilot. We utilized this tool as part of our copilot readiness assessment, using the reports to understand and identify gaps in data protection before they become a risk.
Interested in understanding more about your readiness for Copilot? Get in touch today and we will send you more information about our custom-built copilot readiness assessment product.
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