SharePoint will be enhanced with Data Access Governance to provide admins with a map of the current permission landscape

There is good news and bad news for organizations using SharePoint as their go-to platform for internal management: Microsoft will enhance it with Data Access Governance (DAG) that admins can use to understand the tenant’s current permission landscape and make informed decisions in case of a cybersecurity threat.

According to the latest entry in the Microsoft 365 Roadmap, Data Access Governance will provide a report that reflects the permissions state of not only the SharePoint tenancy but also the return sites.

DAG will be able to tell when sites are being accessed via memberships and unique permissions or when they’re accessed due to a potential attack. If the accessing is malicious, it will be flagged as oversharing, effectively labeling it as a threat that admins can notice and take action to solve.

Here’s what the entry says:

SharePoint admins can now use Data Access Governance (DAG) to understand their tenant’s current permission landscape and make better decisions regarding applications based on permissions such as Copilot. DAG now provides a report that will reflect the latest state of permissions in the entire tenant and return sites that have a greater count of permissioned users than the SharePoint admin specified number. This count considers users accessing sites via site membership and users accessing via unique permissions, as well and acts like a potential threshold for oversharing. Along with the permissioned user count, the report also provides information on the number of existing sharing links (Anyone and People-in-your-org) in those sites and enables SharePoint admins to identify potential root causes for oversharing.

Good news: If your organization’s infrastructure relies on SharePoint, this will greatly increase security and make it safer. Bad news: If your infrastructure relies on many permissions, SharePoint might flag it as a security risk.

However, this setting’s management might be customizable, allowing organizations to designate as many permissions as they see fit.

In other news, the Redmond-based tech giant recently announced that the platform is getting a content pane that will facilitate communication between organizations and their employees.