Unmanaged Cloud Sharing Exposes Organizations to Security Risks

Cloud sharing has become an essential part of modern office life, but it also poses significant security risks for organizations. With millions of teams relying on collaboration suites like Microsoft 365 to share documents with coworkers, clients, and business partners, visibility into sharing is falling further behind.

A recent survey by Wire found that 61% of security leads reported that access to shared files often remains active longer than intended, while over a third acknowledged difficulties in identifying who has access to sensitive shared files. This problem is exacerbated by the highly contextual nature of cloud sharing, where employees share files with specific purposes in mind but often forget to remove access when the project is completed.

Microsoft 365 provides two reporting options for visibility into shared data, but they come with major limitations. The global report on sharing links only shows which sites had the most new links created in the last 28 days, while site-level sharing reports require manual sifting through files to identify problematic sharing. This is where dedicated Identity & Access Governance solutions like tenfold can bridge the visibility gap left by native reporting tools.