Secure your Microsoft Teams

Since Teams is built on top of Microsoft 365 Groups, you can manage permissions, policy assignments, and membership (including guests!) through your Azure Active Directory, and the same compliance and auditing protections as the rest of Microsoft 365 apply. A long list of built-in security features and customization options provide you with flexibility in how you can configure security settings and control guest access in Teams—but doing so manually for every single team can take up a lot of your time.

Because data in Teams falls under the same security and protection settings as the rest of Microsoft 365, the best way to maintain control over sensitive organizational data is to keep it in your tenant where you can protect it, monitor it, and control it. And the best way to do that? Keep self-service features like external sharing and guest access in Teams enabled! If end users can do what they need to with IT-approved tools, they’re less likely to turn to other methods and tools where you have no oversight. That being said, you still need a strategy in place to govern proper use. Having the right security settings and policies ensures that employees use the tools correctly and keep sensitive data secure.

When users access files or folders through Microsoft Teams, that content is actually stored in a team’s associated SharePoint team site. This means sharing settings are controlled in your SharePoint admin center, where they can be configured for your entire organization as well as for individual sites (i.e. at the level of each team). Via your external sharing settings, you can also control whether or not guest users can access shared content in Microsoft Teams. To ensure ongoing data security, we also recommend conducting regular reviews of all your teams’ active external sharing links to validate whether or not that content should still be shared. However, implementing these security best practices with Microsoft’s built-in solutions requires an Azure AD Premium subscription or a ton of time-consuming manual work for IT.

We’ve come up with an easier way to make sure the right users have access to the right things in Teams. With ShareGate’s easy-to-use governance platform for Microsoft Teams, you’re sure your company data stays secure. Apply custom security settings to each team based on its level of sensitivity and get full visibility into what’s being shared externally with whom. And automate external sharing reviews for owners to validate their team’s sharing links on an ongoing basis.