Microsoft Teams Reporting for Better Control over Sensitive Data

Microsoft Teams offers a wealth of business collaboration capabilities for organizations of all sizes, enabling users to chat, make calls, send messages, share documents and hold meetings. But adoption of the service often raises serious security concerns about improper sharing of sensitive data and privilege abuse. Effective MS Teams reporting is vital to strengthening your security posture, spotting threats in their early stages and quickly investigating incidents.

Using native MS Teams reporting

One option is native Microsoft Teams reporting. The Microsoft Teams Admin Center in Office 365 provides an array of dashboards and reports that provide Teams admins with insight into activity in Teams. Via the Analytics & Reports section, you can access various types of reports, such as teams usage reports, device usage reports, user activity reports and data protection reports. (The latter requires a license for the Microsoft Communications DLP service plan.)

The high-level overview of Teams user activity can help you spot unusual activity. However, there is no way drill down into event details from the dashboard; if you need detailed information on who did what, you’ll have to access the Microsoft 365 Security & Compliance Center’s unified audit log. Unfortunately, the log data is difficult to analyze because the log output is not interactive and the format is cumbersome.

Plus, the log keeps information about every event in your environment, so in large environments with many active users, it may contain so many events that you will have to download and parse it manually. As a result, in any but the smallest environments, using the native audit log for investigation is likely to prevent you from getting to the bottom of incidents in a timely manner.

How can Netwrix help?

Netwrix Auditor enables MS Teams administrators to quickly get deep insight into Teams groups, channels, sharing and activity. There’s no need to meticulously rake through the native audit log — you can easily spot threats, drill down into event details, set up alerts on suspicious activity, and quickly find required information through a flexible Google-like search.

The software also allows you to assign each user exactly the reports related to their area of responsibility, without the need to grant them privileged access to the audit information.

Visibility into teams and their membership

Review all changes to teams and their membership in detail so you can spot potential security issues and demonstrate your control over Microsoft Teams.

Insight into overexposed data

Prevent data leaks by identifying teams that expose documents to anonymous or external users, who might share sensitive information inappropriately and cause a data breach.

Control over user activity

Gain visibility into what your users are doing around sensitive data stored in Microsoft Teams to streamline incident investigation and prove compliance.

Pass compliance audits with ease

Prepare for audits and get answers to tricky questions from auditors in no time using set of predefined compliance reports.

Alerts on threats and automated report generation

Get informed about security incidents faster by receiving alerts on suspicious events, such as a user copying a large number of sensitive documents in a short period of time. Plus, use the subscription feature to automatically provide weekly or daily reports on your Teams infrastructure to the right people.