Prevent Your Enterprise SharePoint from Disasters

 Prevent Your Enterprise SharePoint from Disasters

In theory, a SharePoint administrator's work is relatively straightforward: manage the platform to ensure it functions smoothly, minimize downtime, issue access permissions, and remove people as needed. However, with over a million businesses using Office 365 today, the SharePoint ecosystem might be critical for the company, and any disruption could cost them both time and money, making it more difficult for the administrators to manage it.


Therefore, in practice, SharePoint administrators have a lot to deal with, mainly because it has evolved into a corporate dumping ground where users upload data haphazardly, wrecking chaos. Employees frequently lose track of their belongings or location due to uploading files to random libraries without regard for their extension, size, or other attributes. This has necessitated the development of a SharePoint file management system to manage data better and prevent data privacy issues, attacks, or plain blunders. Luckily a few simple steps can help enterprise SharePoint avoid disaster to some extent.


Keeping an eye on storage quotas

Though the users might think of SharePoint as a file share with unlimited storage and overhead, it is not. Therefore, it is critical to keep track of how much space is being used and how. 


This can be simply done by educating the tenants of SharePoint on what they are entitled to and what not. Additionally, they can be educated on SharePoint backup, restore features, and the SharePoint archive to better manage the space. But the managing of the SharePoint storage quotas will need to be done differently depending on what version of SharePoint your company is using:

  • SharePoint Online: Storage for Office 365 archive and other suite features is a shared resource accessible to all site tenants until they reach the 1TB limit. Beyond that, the SharePoint Online admin center is where you manage your site collection quotas.

  • SharePoint On-premises: SharePoint on-premises offers a lot of the same features as SharePoint Online, but you may define storage quotas with varying allocations and email and communication archiving thresholds. This limit applies to all collection locations, including space used by versions and recycling bins.


You may send email warnings to the tenants about their space usage on each method listed above.


Auditing permissions

In addition to identifying how much space users use, keeping a careful check on how and what they store is also necessary. This is because SharePoint, particularly the online edition, can have far-reaching consequences, including the risk of data loss and PII privacy issues if not appropriately maintained.


Though SharePoint's permission inheritance model is quite simple, if your users start breaking it, it's unclear who has access to what, which may lead to difficulties, including data theft or malware attack. Therefore, auditing them and monitoring who performs what will help mitigate some of such hazards. For that, SharePoint governance and built-in auditing capabilities can be configured on a list/library level to record a series of events, including objects being opened, changed, and deleted, among other things.


Backing backup policies

Just like cleaning the clutter from your SharePoint solution by deleting redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) data, backing up the files with strong backup policies is also essential. But this step may involve several sub-steps, from examining backup plans at an enterprise level to what end users are doing to ensure data privacy compliance.


Regardless, SharePoint is a versatile tool that can be customized to meet business backup requirements where end-users can use versioning systems without administrative or IT assistance. Moreover, enabling versioning guarantees that at the very least historical copies of objects are available records management, internal and external audits, and early case assessments, with the recycle bin serving as a fallback option after deletion. 


Living the disaster recovery plan

Business continuity and disaster recovery are intertwined and should be considered critical to a company's success, significantly if it is constrained by compliance or industry-specific regulations. This entails several factors, but at the absolute least will include:

  • determining which aspects of the SharePoint platform, policies, and add-ons are the most beneficial for the company

  • deploying a robust data archiving solution from a system-level to enterprise-level and deciding what goes into it and what stays out

  • in case of an attack, determining the course of action, such as how fast such a repair should be completed

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