In today’s fast-paced digital world, organizations rely heavily on SharePoint for collaboration and document management. However, with great functionality comes equally significant security challenges. In this blog post, we explore a day in the life of two security professionals as they confront and resolve SharePoint access control and audit issues—comparing the agile, real-time capabilities of Veza with the detailed, compliance-focused approach of Legacy IGA.
Meet the Engineers
Alicia – Senior Information Security Engineer
Working at a highly regulated financial institution, Alicia is responsible for ensuring that sensitive financial documents and client data remain secure within SharePoint. With tight regulatory requirements, her day demands constant vigilance over access permissions and audit trails, as even a minor oversight could lead to significant compliance issues.
Mark – IT Security Manager
At a dynamic tech firm, Mark manages the central SharePoint environment that powers internal collaboration. Balancing user productivity with security, Mark’s role revolves around periodic audits and maintaining structured compliance reports. His organization prefers a methodical, scheduled approach to uncover and remediate potential vulnerabilities.
Though their organizations differ, both Alicia and Mark face a common challenge: protecting SharePoint from internal misconfigurations and external threats, all while ensuring seamless operations.
Incident 1: Unauthorized Permission Escalation –
When More Is Too Much
8:20 AM – The Unexpected Elevation
Alicia receives a Veza alert in her security dashboard: an employee in one department has been inadvertently granted administrative rights to several sensitive SharePoint libraries. The alert, flagged as an unusual permission change, provides Alicia with full context—who made the change when it happened, and what data is now at risk. With this immediate visibility, she can act before any unauthorized access occurs.
Alicia’s Response with Veza:
Leveraging Veza’s real-time, cross-platform view, Alicia instantly identifies the overextended permissions not only within SharePoint but across associated cloud services. With actionable insights delivered straight to her dashboard, she swiftly revokes the excessive rights and reinforces multi-factor authentication for the affected account—all within minutes.
Mark’s Response with Legacy IGA:
Mark’s Legacy IGA solution flags the permission escalation during its scheduled audit cycle. Although the detailed report provides an in-depth breakdown of the access change, Mark must now manually initiate a review process to verify and remediate the issue. The response, while thorough, lacks the immediacy Alicia experienced with Veza.
Veza Advantage:
By offering instantaneous visibility and automated remediation across multiple environments, Veza empowers security teams to counteract potential breaches in real time—ideal for fast-moving incidents where every minute counts.
Incident 2: External Sharing Misconfigurations –
A Breach in Collaboration
10:05 AM – The External Exposure
Mark receives an alert indicating that a SharePoint site—intended solely for internal collaboration—has recently had external users added. While external sharing is a common practice for project collaboration, this unexpected inclusion raises concerns about potential exposure of confidential project documents.
Mark’s Response with Legacy IGA:
The Legacy IGA’s compliance process requires Mark to investigate the change manually. While he values the depth of historical access logs, confirming whether sensitive data has been exposed involves sifting through detailed reports and validating configurations—an approach that can be time-consuming and delay clarity.
Alicia’s Response with Veza:
At the same time, Veza’s automated alert system notifies Alicia of the external sharing anomaly. With a single click, she accesses a consolidated view of all external connections linked to the affected SharePoint site. Veza not only pinpoints the misconfiguration but also initiates a predefined workflow—triggering actions like creating a ServiceNow ticket or launching a Jira task to lock down external access. This swift, automated process helps mitigate potential risk before exposure occurs.
Veza Advantage:
Veza’s immediate, unified interface empowers security teams to swiftly detect and address configuration risks, reducing the window of vulnerability and ensuring alignment with governance policies.
Incident 3: Audit Trail Anomalies –
Uncovering Hidden Access Patterns
1:15 PM – The Curious Case of the Anomalous Logins
An unusual series of access events in SharePoint’s audit trails raises concerns. Multiple accounts appear to be accessing documents at irregular intervals—a pattern that could indicate either a benign process or the early signs of a security breach.
Alicia’s Response with Veza:
Veza’s dynamic correlation engine immediately detects the anomaly and aggregates access data from SharePoint along with other integrated systems. The unified timeline allows Alicia to rapidly isolate the affected accounts and investigate whether these actions deviate from normal behaviour. Her proactive measures ensure that any malicious activity is nipped in the bud.
Mark’s Response with Legacy IGA:
The Legacy IGA’s comprehensive audit reporting highlights the irregularities as part of its scheduled review process. While the tool provides a rich set of historical data and compliance metrics, Mark will only realize this when the next scheduled review process runs, and even then must invest additional time to manually analyze the activity trends and determine the necessary corrective actions.
Veza Advantage:
For organizations needing prompt intervention, Veza’s real-time analytics offer a decisive edge by rapidly connecting the dots across disparate data sources—empowering teams to act immediately when unusual access patterns emerge.
Incident 4: Compliance Audit Challenge –
The Pressure of Accountability
3:45 PM – Audit Day Discrepancies
In preparation for an upcoming external compliance audit, both Alicia’s and Mark’s organizations are under the microscope. A deep dive into SharePoint’s access logs reveals discrepancies between user permissions and documented access controls—a red flag that demands swift resolution.
Alicia’s Response with Veza:
Using Veza’s unified dashboard, Alicia quickly compiles a comprehensive audit trail that spans all integrated cloud platforms, including SharePoint. The tool’s intuitive interface simplifies the process of reconciling permissions with actual user behaviour, allowing her to generate a detailed, audit-ready report on the fly. Her proactive remediation of any discrepancies demonstrates her organization’s commitment to strong governance.
Mark’s Response with Legacy IGA:
Mark turns to the Legacy IGA’s structured compliance reports to address the audit findings. While the Legacy IGA’s strength lies in its robust, policy-driven analysis and detailed historical logs, the process requires a more methodical review and manual validation of each discrepancy – a slower approach that demands additional effort to ensure accuracy before the audit deadline..
Veza Advantage:
Veza’s ability to integrate real-time data with historical context streamlines the audit process, reducing the manual overhead and enabling faster, more confident responses during high-stakes compliance reviews.
Conclusion: Choosing the Right Tool for Your
SharePoint Security Strategy
Both Veza and Legacy IGAs provide powerful capabilities for managing access controls and conducting audits within SharePoint environments. While the Legacy IGA excels in detailed compliance reporting and structured policy enforcement, Veza distinguishes itself with its real-time, cross-platform insights and automated remediation features.
For organizations where immediate visibility and rapid response are critical to protecting sensitive SharePoint data, Veza offers an agile and comprehensive solution. Conversely, companies that prioritize in-depth historical analysis and rigorous compliance checks may find Legacy IGAs to be a better fit. Ultimately, the choice between these tools depends on your organization’s specific security needs, risk tolerance, and operational tempo.
By understanding the strengths of each platform through real-world scenarios, security professionals like Alicia and Mark can tailor their strategies to ensure that SharePoint remains a secure and reliable cornerstone of their digital infrastructure.
