How secure your SharePoint is?

Today more and more organizations are adopting MS SharePoint to manage and share their sensitive business data, to collaborate among employees and to satisfy their business needs. With so much confidential information moving to SharePoint, security of that information is also very important. If your information or data is not even safe in SharePoint then what is the point of using it. Read this article to know how you can make SharePoint a safer place for your data.

1. SharePoint access right: Do you keep track of who all are accessing your confidential data? It is very important to know which user and group are accessing what data. Some organizations have assigned administrator authority to too many people and this creates security threat. Assign administrative authority only to responsible people who can handle SharePoint infrastructure. Permission and access right should be assigned properly to each user. Without a clear indication of how permission management works in your organization, it would be quite difficult for you to secure your data.
2. Farm security: A SharePoint farm contains all type of server like database server, application server that works together to provide services to user. So the security of SharePoint farm should be your top priority. Since farm admin has all the rights to manage web applications, backing and restoring farm so be very careful while granting such level of authority.
3. Sharing policy: A recent survey has shown that 45 % users regularly copy the confidential data of company from SharePoint to their pen drive, hard disk or to mail. And this data is being shared with people who don't have access rights to SharePoint data. So strict policies should be made to clearly define how and with whom information can be shared.
4. Server security: SharePoint is a complex piece of software; consist of Windows, IIS, AD and SQL Server. Security issue with any of them can be disastrous for your SharePoint. Similarly security of SharePoint server is also very important and so unavoidable. Patching is important tool for the security of SQL Server but make sure it won't affect SharePoint performance. Also install server antivirus and firewall to protect server from attackers.
5. Anonymous access: Don't allow anonymous access as it allows non authenticated user to access a SharePoint web application.
6. Keep an eye on employee’s activity: Keep record of every information that is being accessed and shared through SharePoint. Sometime employees share confidential information with your competitors which is the biggest security threat for your organization.