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TMI: How cloud collaboration suites drive oversharing and unmanaged access. Sharing links take seconds to create, but can last for years. Partner Content Seamless collaboration through cloud platforms like Microsoft 365 has radically reshaped the modern workplace. In the span of an hour, you could go from uploading budget proposals to a project channel to live editing a joint presentation with a business partner, all while making lunch plans over Teams. From remote work to video calls, it’s never been easier to connect people, ideas, and information. The downside is that cloud collaboration has also made IT environments more challenging to manage. It empowered users to make decisions about access without any real oversight. Easy document sharing with coworkers, freelancers, or business partners might be the point of these platforms, but what if your team is sharing too much, for too long, and with too many people? Oversharing in Microsoft 365 can take many forms. It starts innocently enough with access that serves a business need, but persists for longer than intended. Do these scenarios sound familiar to you? Unwanted cloud access follows a clear pattern. Users share content with others, but they either invite more people than they needed to or forget to remove them later on. And with no way to monitor sharing across tens of thousands of cloud files, orgs remain in the dark about who exactly has access to all that shared content. The storm on the horizon Considering how deeply we have come to rely on collaboration suites, the business risk posed by unmanaged cloud access is enormous. The dangers range from simple misclicks exposing confidential information by accident to deliberate leaks and sabotage. Stories of former staff enacting revenge on ex-employers have become increasingly common in recent years. Then there is the constant risk that accounts themselves could be breached, giving attackers access to any content you have shared with the affected user. This is especially dangerous when it comes to external sharing, where you depend on the security practices of another organization to keep you safe. The fewer people have access, the lower the risk. There is a reason why the principle of least privilege has become a best practice to keep sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands. In simple terms, you should only provide access to people who need it to do their jobs, and only for as long as they need it. Unnecessary access, such as the kind created by oversharing in Microsoft 365, only increases the risk to your organization. How to regain control of the cloud Despite these risks, Microsoft 365 offers few options to safeguard shared content. Organizations can choose to restrict sharing, either by limiting who users can share with or by blocking external sharing entirely. Practically, though, locking users out of this useful feature is hardly a realistic solution. Seamless sharing is the reason for cloud collaboration in the first place. Instead of a blanket ban on sharing, a better approach is to focus on visibility. Allow users to share content as they need, but give your security team the means to monitor what is being shared and who has access. This allows you to benefit from the convenience of easy sharing, while helping you identify and remediate unwanted cloud access. Unfortunately, neither built-in Microsoft 365 features nor paid add-ons offer this level of visibility into shared content. Most governance tools limit themselves to managing users and groups. They ignore access rights on unstructured data like the countless files your users are sharing through Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint. Yet those files are precisely what's at risk from poorly managed cloud access. Financial documents buried in Teams channels. Customer information shared with former business partners. Contractors that retain access to project files. Without a governance platform that can handle unstructured cloud data, at-risk files are practically impossible to spot. Complete visibility at every level Cloud collaboration is a powerful tool. Yet while seamless sharing makes our work lives easier, unmanaged sharing can cause incredible harm. In order to regain control of shared content, you need a solution that gives you both high-level and in-depth visibility, from app settings down to individual files. This level of detailed insight is essential to ensure that access to shared content remains appropriate, even as users leave, projects end, and business relationships change. Many IGA solutions only show you the tip of the iceberg. But tenfold goes beyond users and groups, giving you a full breakdown of access rights on unstructured data. Here are two ways our cloud governance suite helps you secure shared content. Don’t let oversharing become a security blind spot. tenfold gives you the visibility you need to manage shared content with confidence. To learn more about our powerful IGA features and deep Microsoft 365 integration, book your tenfold demo today! Contributed by tenfold.