Your SharePoint environment is storing some of your most sensitive business data. Do you have a clear picture of who has access to your data?
SharePoint auditing provides organizations with transparency and a clear view of security to help them fulfill regulatory requirements, identify insider threats, and track changes in user and administrator activities.
What is SharePoint Auditing?
SharePoint auditing is the process of monitoring and recording activities that take place within your SharePoint environment across sites, libraries, lists, and content repositories
Think of it as a detailed activity log for your SharePoint world. It records activities ranging from a user opening a document, updating a file, or modifying permission levels to an individual sharing data with an external party.
This helps organizations answer the questions that matter most when something goes wrong:
- Who accessed a specific document?
- When was a file modified or deleted?
- Who changed permissions on a sensitive site?
- Was confidential data shared with external users?
- Which administrator made that configuration change?
What Activities Can be Audited in SharePoint?
SharePoint auditing covers a broad range of activities that include the following:
- Content and Document Activities: Documents are a major part of SharePoint and often the biggest target for misuse. Auditing captures file creation, editing, deletion, document access, downloads, and restoration of deleted files. This visibility is critical for spotting unusual file access patterns before they escalate into a serious data breach.
- User and Permission Activities: Permissions are the first line of defense. Unauthorized permission changes increase the risk of data exposure. SharePoint auditing tracks permission changes, role assignments, SharePoint group membership changes, and changes to sharing permissions. Authentication events such as user sign-ins and failed sign-in attempts are recorded separately (for example, in Microsoft Entra ID for SharePoint Online).
- Sharing and Administrative Activities: SharePoint is built for collaboration, which means content constantly moves between users and sometimes goes outside of the intended boundaries. Auditing helps track both internal and external sharing events, the creation and removal of sharing links, external guest access, and changes to site administration and configuration made by admins. By itself, this category can help prevent many accidental data exposures.
Why is SharePoint Auditing Important?
Beyond security, SharePoint auditing also helps organizations maintain better governance and operational efficiency:
- Strengthens Security: SharePoint auditing helps identify vulnerabilities and enables organizations to take measures to secure sensitive information. A detailed audit can reveal security loopholes that can be fixed before a breach occurs. By monitoring unusual access patterns, bulk downloads, and unexpected permission changes, SharePoint auditing helps security teams detect potential insider threats before they result in data exposure.
- Supports Compliance Requirements: SharePoint auditing helps ensure that your SharePoint environment is set up to meet regulatory requirements and industry standards. Not only is this a must for legal compliance, but it is also a great way to build trust with your clients.
- Simplified Investigation: SharePoint audit records let an investigator identify the user who triggered an event, reconstruct an accurate timeline of actions, determine whether the breach has spread beyond one file, and track the sequence of activities that led to the incident.
- Improves Governance: Regular analysis of SharePoint audit records allows organizations to see the accounts that have too many privileges, implement the principle of least-privilege access throughout that environment, and detect content that has been shared beyond the limit.
Native SharePoint Auditing Capabilities and Limitations
Capabilities
Native SharePoint auditing means Microsoft’s built-in logging and reporting tools. Using these features, administrators can capture, analyze, and export activity data of site collections, libraries, and lists.
- SharePoint Server Auditing: With SharePoint on-premises, administrators can configure audit settings at the site collection level. The events to be monitored and the audit reports can be selected directly from within the server environment.
- SharePoint Online Auditing: SharePoint Online is connected to Microsoft Purview Audit, a centralized logging and compliance platform. This allows audit data from SharePoint Online to be analyzed alongside activity from other Microsoft 365 services like Exchange, Teams, and OneDrive, allowing you to have a more comprehensive view of user behavior in your digital workplace.
Limitations
While SharePoint auditing tools are an excellent resource, they come with a set of limitations that can make it difficult to improve security and compliance on a large scale.
- Fragmented Experiences: SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online use auditing methods in their own distinct ways. Dealing with them simultaneously in a hybrid environment is a complex task.
- Limited Reporting: Built-in tools offer raw audit data. However, creating insightful dashboards, analyzing trends, and producing user-friendly reports is a large manual task.
- Alerting and Monitoring Challenges: Native auditing keeps a record of events, but it doesn’t provide immediate alerts when suspicious activity occurs.
- Manual Investigation Processes: Searching through native audit records to reconstruct what happened during an incident takes time that security teams rarely have.
- Siloed Visibility: Organizations maintaining file servers, Active Directory, and other Microsoft 365 environments will have to investigate separately, as there is no centralized view. This makes it difficult to audit multiple environments from a single console.
SharePoint Auditing Best Practices
Consider the following best practices to leverage and enhance your SharePoint auditing program:
- Prioritize High-Risk Content: Not all SharePoint libraries have the same risk level. Concentrate your deepest audits on sites that have confidential documents, financial data, customer records, and intellectual property.
- Monitor Permission and Sharing Changes: These are among the most significant security changes in SharePoint. One unauthorized permission change can potentially lead to the exposure of a huge amount of data.
- Regularly Review Audit Logs: Audit logs are a waste if they are not being reviewed properly. Incorporate regular logging review sessions in your security workflows. Don’t rely on an incident to discover the logs.
- Retain Audit Data: Decide how long to retain audit data based on compliance requirements and ensure your system is configured to maintain that retention period.
- Set up Alerts for Critical Events: Automate notifications for high-risk activities, including unauthorized access attempts, mass downloads, external sharing changes, and privilege modifications.
- Conduct Periodic Access Reviews: Utilize audit data to regularly clean up unnecessary permissions, deactivate unused accounts, and reduce overall exposure.
How Lepide Helps with SharePoint Auditing
Lepide extends SharePoint auditing capabilities by providing a unified, AI-powered platform for auditing SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online. Lepide Auditor for SharePoint helps organizations overcome the limitations of native auditing issues as it consolidates auditing events into easy-to-understand reports, providing complete information on who made a change, what was changed, when it was done, and where it happened, and showing before-and-after values wherever applicable.
With Lepide, organizations can:
- Track external sharing of data in SharePoint Online and SharePoint Server to have full visibility and control over sensitive information.
- Detect suspicious activity and mitigate risks tied to data exposure by enabling real-time alerts, generating extensive reports, and using AI-supported insights.
- Implement pre-built compliance templates for regulatory standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS.
- Assign role-based access to audit data to maintain the integrity of auditing records.
- Identify users with excessive permissions and monitor changes in permissions to support least-privilege access and decrease data exposure risks.
Frequently Asked Questions
SharePoint auditing monitors activities like accessing files, making changes, deleting files, changing permissions, sharing externally, and site management in both cloud and on-premises environments.
In SharePoint Server, auditing is set up at the Site Collection Administration level, where you choose the specific events to audit. However, SharePoint Online relies on Microsoft Purview Audit, which comes with auditing turned on for most tenants by default and logs supported events automatically.
Yes, SharePoint auditing can record permission changes like who made the permission changes, what was altered, and when the modification happened.
SharePoint audit log retention depends on the Microsoft 365 subscription and retention policies set up. Native retention capabilities may be limited, which is why many organizations opt for third-party tools for longer storage and analytics.
Third-party SharePoint auditing solutions offer enhanced monitoring, real-time alerting, in-depth reporting, and more straightforward tracking of user activities, changes in permissions, and potential security threats.
