What are the best practices for managing permissions in SharePoint Online?
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Permissions dictate who can access, modify, and share content, thereby making it crucial to manage them with precision and care. Mismanagement can lead to unauthorized access, data leaks, and compliance issues, which can significantly impact your organization.
To maintain secure and efficient SharePoint Online environment, consider the best practices listed below.
- Grant Minimum Permissions: Assign users the bare minimum access level required for their specific tasks. This reduces security risks and simplifies permission management.
- Limit Owners: Minimize the number of users in the default SPO owners group. Assign most users as members or visitors for better control and reduce the risk of accidental changes or unauthorized actions.
- Centralized Security for Sensitive Data: Create separate SharePoint sites or libraries for highly sensitive documents. This avoids scattering them across a larger library with complex permission structures.
- Limited Use of Custom Permissions: Avoid creating and using custom permission levels excessively. Utilize them only when needed to avoid unnecessary complexity in access control.
- Leverage Inherited Permissions: For subsites within your SharePoint Online environment, utilize site-level permissions to provide the same level of access control as the parent site.
- Minimize Breaking Inheritance: While you can stop inheriting permissions for specific site content, strive to minimize this practice. Breaking inheritance can lead to complex structures that are difficult to manage.
Whether you're an experienced admin or new to SharePoint, these ideas for managing permissions will help you maintain secure, efficient, and compliant SharePoint Online.