SharePoint provides a great platform for collaboration, whether for internal teams, or for collaboration with business partners, contractors, and consultants.

Security can be sometimes viewed as the enemy of collaboration and interworking, or at a minimum, as an inconvenience that end users must suffer through to gain the benefits of collaboration.

In terms of securing SharePoint sites being used for collaboration, the first thing potential users tend think of with respect to security, particularly with respect to sensitive content, is "how do we control where our information ends up?" In other words, finding ways to control usage of files and content when they are downloaded or checked out from SharePoint file repositories. This is a valid concern, but it should not be the only concern or risk to consider.

Consider a use case whereby a team of individuals, including several who are not employees, are using SharePoint to work on an M&A project. Risks to be considered here include preventing end users from doing something dumb (downloading sensitive content to an unencrypted laptop and having it lost or stolen), doing something malicious (copying sensitive data off to a USB stick and selling the information to a competitor), as well as preventing those not on the collaboration team from taking a peek at the content stored in the site.

Most experienced IT and SharePoint admins will admit that it is trivially easy to access information stored in SharePoint. If the data stored in the SharePoint site is encrypted via SQL TDE, this is still true, because administrators can add themselves to the collaboration group, access the information, and hide their tracks.

Think through where your security concerns really lie- is it only from the SharePoint web front end out, towards users, or are there insider security concerns that you need to address? If you have high value, sensitive, or regulated content being stored on your collaboration site, the answer is likely to be "both". Even if you do a great job of securing content on user's endpoint systems, you may be sharing content with people inside of your organization who have no legitimate need to know.

Transparent content encryption that inserts at a high enough point in the application stack is the answer to preventing insiders from accessing sensitive content in SharePoint. Check out CipherPoint's technology, and contact us for a product demonstration or to request a trial at info@cipherpointsoftware.com .