Microsoft SharePoint is rapidly gaining popularity in the collaborative software market, yet a large portion of those deployments are rogue, placing enterprise networks at risk from both a threat propagation and data loss perspective.
Application Visibility and Control
SharePoint is used to host web sites and provide access to shared workspaces, documents and specialized applications such as wikis and blogs. SharePoint sites are actually ASP.NET applications, which are hosted on Microsoft IIS and use a Microsoft SQL Server database as data storage backend. But most people are unaware that:
- According to Gartner (March 2009), SharePoint is the 3rd most popular collaborative tool (20%) behind Oracle (30%) and IBM (32%).
- SharePoint is growing at 48% year over year while the others creep along at 10%.
- SharePoint uses IIS and MS-SQL as part of a three tiered architecture – which of course introduces business and security risks (IIS and SQL are targeted by attackers).
- According to Neil McDonald of Gartner, it is estimated that 30% of the SharePoint deployments are rogue.
- Palo Alto Networks identifies and controls six SharePoint application elements (SharePoint, SharePoint-admin, SharePoint-blog-posting, SharePoint-calendar, SharePoint-documents, SharePoint-wiki) as well as MS SQL to enable fine-grained policy control over SharePoint use.
- SharePoint showed up in 86% of the enterprises analyzed in the two most recent Application Usage and Risk Reports (n=123).
- In those same two Application Usage and Risk Reports, we found 38 Critical, High and Medium severity threats that target MS SQL, IIS and SharePoint.
To learn more about our findings around SharePoint and how Palo Alto Networks can help enterprises protect those deployments using a combination of segmentation, App-ID, User-ID and Content-ID, check out the new whitepaper – Protecting SharePoint Deployments with Palo Alto Networks.
