UPDATE: 2 November 2021 - SharePoint Protection is now available for customers
Many companies use Microsoft 365 as their main platform to connect with employees, partners, and customers. SharePoint enables businesses to create dynamic collaboration environments that improves productivity, data management, and optimize content delivery. In addition to obvious benefits of SharePoint, this will unfortunately introduce security risks especially on SharePoint sites shared with external parties.
F-Secure Elements for Microsoft 365 complements the native email and SharePoint security capabilities of Microsoft 365 by providing advanced security protection against phishing, ransomware malicious files, internal email risks, malicious attachments and URLs.
With the latest addition to F-Secure Elements for Microsoft 365 we are proud to announce the extension of protection to the SharePoint platform. This exciting new functionality will be added to all our F-Secure Elements for Microsoft 365 customers without additional costs.
Why is protecting SharePoint important?
It’s each organization’s own responsibility to verify that their collaboration platforms provide defenses against deception, social engineering, malicious content and targeted attacks. However, identifying and addressing the potential gaps in the built-in Microsoft 365 security capabilities is a challenging task for any organization.
Microsoft provides built-in security with their Email Online Protection (EOP) and SharePoint. However, advanced security features, such as sandboxing (safe attachments), are available only with higher tier subscriptions of ATP Plan 2 or Enterprise E5.
Basic email security or collaboration tools do not provide adequate defense against advanced and targeted attacks, or sophisticated phishing attempts. As more and more users rely on Microsoft 365, it is drawing attention from hackers to design and test their attacks in a way that wouldn’t get caught by standard Microsoft security.
To mitigate cloud collaboration risks, a purpose-built security solution with the highest possible detection rates should be considered to protect your users from external and internal threats. Furthermore, a solution which can provide security from endpoints to the cloud is more cost-effective and easier to manage.
How does F-Secure Elements for Microsoft 365 provide protection for SharePoint?
F-Secure Elements for Microsoft 365 is a cloud-based security service that is designed to mitigate cloud collaboration risks in organizations by providing effective threat protection for Microsoft 365. The service leverages cloud-to-cloud integration that doesn't require any middleware or software to be installed and is extremely fast to deploy and easy to manage. F‑Secure’s default policies help to eliminate configuration errors that can leave your security environment exposed and ineffective.
Files stored on protected SharePoint sites are scanned and checked against malicious content, such as viruses, trojans, ransomware, and other advanced malware. F-Secure Security Cloud employs multi-stage content analysis in a stepped process triggered by the risk profile of the content. Additionally, high-risk files are subjected to a deeper analysis with our cloud sandboxing technology, which is designed to prevent zero-day malware attacks and other advanced threats.
Based on the verdict of F-Secure Security Cloud, the file is categorized as either harmful or clean. In case the content is found malicious, it will be placed into quarantine.
Please note that support for SharePoint sites that are used with Teams is coming later.
How to install SharePoint protection for F-Secure Elements for Microsoft 365?
SharePoint protection will be added to our existing customers without additional costs. In order to take SharePoint protection into use follow these steps:
- Log into F-Secure Elements Security Center,
- Go to the Cloud Services page,
- Authorize the connection to SharePoint, and
- Configure the protection for your SharePoint sites.
We have prepared a short video showing these steps: