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Introducing Security for AI Copilots in SaaS Apps

Published November 19, 2024

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We are delighted to introduce new capabilities in Securiti Data Command Center - Security for SaaS AI Copilots in SaaS Apps!  The biggest impediment in adopting AI Copilots, like Microsoft 365 Copilot, is the security & governance of data. Organizations must ensure that data does not inadvertently leak to the wrong employees via Copilot prompt responses, nor get exposed to third parties and AI plugins.  Securiti provides comprehensive capabilities for preventing such issues, enabling organizations to confidently boost employee productivity while ensuring robust security and continuous data controls.

AI solutions like Microsoft 365 Copilot offer a game-changing way for employees to access and leverage vast amounts of enterprise data across M365 applications. It is designed to enhance productivity by providing seamless search and analysis capabilities. However, this power comes with a new set of risks. In the rush to enable Copilot, some organizations have overlooked critical data governance controls—leading to unintended access to sensitive information. Employees can unknowingly query confidential data that isn’t their own, such as salary details of other employees, company M&A plans, and even secrets like passwords—data they should not be able to access.

The risks don’t stop there. With Microsoft Copilot’s deep integration with services like Bing search and third-party applications, corporate data may be exposed beyond the secure boundaries of the M365 environment.

But why is securing Copilot so challenging? The complexity lies within the Sharepoint data security and governance, where the majority of M365 data resides.

See:  Top companies ground Microsoft Copilot over data governance concerns (Source: The Register)

“Security and corporate governance concerns are weighing heavily on large enterprises as they try to work Microsoft Copilots into their organizations amid a complex web of existing tech products and access rights.”
The Register

According to a recent Gartner report, only 6% of the organizations piloting Microsoft 365 Copilot have completed projects and are ready for large-scale deployments. Securiti’s solution, Security for SaaS AI Copilots, powered by its Data Command Graph™, equips organizations to harness data safely with automated data access and governance controls. With granular, file-level contextual intelligence, out-of-the-box risk insights, and automated remediation, Securiti’s latest innovation prevents unintended data exposure, strengthens security posture, and enhances the efficacy of Copilot responses to deliver safe, precise, AI-driven insights to employees.

Is Your Microsoft SharePoint Environment Ready for Copilot?

For many organizations, SharePoint environments are far from clean or secure, and with the introduction of Microsoft Copilot, these issues become more pressing.

Here are the Seven Key Challenges organizations face in securing SharePoint:

  • Over-Privileged Access: Security teams often grant broad access to SharePoint files by default to avoid managing individual permission requests, leading to overexposed sensitive data.
  • Lack of Visibility: Many organizations don’t know who can access what data or where sensitive data resides, making it difficult to identify and address access risks effectively.
  • Complex Permissions Management: With billions of possible permission combinations, managing who should access which files becomes an overwhelming task.
  • Ineffective Data Labeling: Microsoft’s native tools don’t accurately label files and impose limits on the number of files that can be labeled per day. Lack of an effective labeling process makes it difficult to govern data at scale.
  • Obsolete Data: Many organizations store outdated data for years, leaving it ungoverned. When Copilot retrieves this obsolete information to respond to a prompt, it can provide wrong answers to employees.
  • Balancing Security and Productivity: Employees need swift access to data for productivity, but security teams are tasked with enforcing data controls. Balancing these priorities is a constant challenge.

These challenges aren’t new, but Copilot amplifies them—making it essential to reevaluate your SharePoint security approach.

The Risks of Uncontrolled Copilot Rollout

As a result of these SharePoint data security governance challenges, many organizations are left with a tough choice: either turn off Copilot access entirely or face the insider risk of employees gaining unauthorized access to sensitive data.

But the risks don’t end there. Beyond insider threats, there’s also the danger of data exfiltration. Employees may inadvertently share sensitive information externally or copy it to unsecured locations. Even more concerning, attackers could compromise an employee’s identity, gaining access to Copilot and using it for larger reconnaissance attacks.

Gartner has predicted that by April 2025, Copilot will be involved in a major data breach. On top of security concerns, organizations also face compliance risks—especially when employees can access each other’s personal data, potentially leading to significant regulatory fines.

So, how can you safely adopt Copilot while mitigating these risks?

6-Step Approach to Enable Safe Use of Copilot with Microsoft SharePoint

At Securiti AI, we believe in enabling AI innovation while keeping your data secure. Here’s how we help you safely adopt Copilot by automating SharePoint data security and governance through our six-step framework:

1) Identify & Remediate Risky and Unintended Access Permissions

The most complex data risk that organizations using Microsoft Copilot must address is ‘unintended entitlements.’ Within SharePoint, granting incorrect permissions can result in unintended exposure of sensitive data between team members. Microsoft Copilot amplifies this risk by making it easier to analyze information available through these access permissions. To mitigate this, organizations need to continuously uncover and fix such risky entitlement combinations. This requires a systematic detection and remediation program.

Securiti’s powerful Data Command Graph simplifies the process of identifying ‘risky combinations’ of file and folder permissions using graph rules. The Data Command Graph provides the relationship context of each file, its sensitivity, individual and group user permissions, and regulatory constructs. It allows you to simply create graph rules, generate findings, and assign them to the right teams for remediation. For example, it’s easy to configure a rule to detect users outside of HR and Finance who have access to files with sensitive compensation information owned by those departments.

You can instantly find users, groups and the specific permissions they have to access sites or files as well as leverage advanced metadata data such as ownership information to identify entitlements that must be fixed to establish least-privileged access controls like restricting access to files with high-sensitivity data labels.

2) Leverage Copilot Native Security Controls

You can configure Microsoft Copilot to avoid files with certain labels when generating answers, but applying these labels at scale and with accuracy is a challenge. Even Microsoft’s native tools struggle to scale and offer limited flexibility.

 

Securiti’s powerful Data Command Graph provides ultimate flexibility to label files with precision and at scale based on a variety of attributes such as data classification, file types, content profile, ownership, location, security posture, regulations, age and more, For instance, you can label files containing intellectual property data as “Confidential”. Once these labels are applied, you can then instruct Copilot to exclude files labeled “Confidential” when responding to user queries. This ensures that you fully leverage Copilot’s native security controls to protect your company’s sensitive data.

3) Prioritize Sensitive Data Risks

Misconfigurations in Microsoft SharePoint can expose sensitive data that Microsoft Copilot might use to generate answers, leading to significant data leaks and breaches. 

Securiti helps you prioritize toxic or risky combinations where sensitive data is shared too broadly within the organization or is accessible externally by non-employees.

The built-in, AI-powered data classification accurately identifies hundreds of types of sensitive data elements, including proprietary documents like financial reports, company secrets, and strategic plans. Securiti also analyzes the configuration posture of Microsoft SharePoint, detecting files and folders that are shared too broadly or exposed externally. With Securiti’s out-of-the-box risky-combination rules powered by the Data Command Graph, you can quickly prioritize and prevent exposure of sensitive data through Microsoft Copilot.

4) Automatically Assess SharePoint Security Posture

Securiti automatically reviews your SharePoint security settings to ensure proper configurations, such as preventing files in new sites from being accessible to external users by default. Companies should also ensure that Microsoft Copilot adheres to native security best practices. 

5) Automatically Remediate Access Issues

Securiti automatically notifies SharePoint site and file owners of misconfigured access, enabling them to quickly fix security posture and access issues—without disrupting employees’ access to critical data they need. Solution enables you to scope your Sharepoint remediation policy to specific findings such as those related to critical sites or files containing sensitive information to make it manageable for site owners to address the issues then need to fix. Notifications can be routed to ticketing systems such ServiceNow or Jira as well as messaging options such as Slack or Email, thus enabling users to prioritize remediations as a part of their daily administrative tasks.

6) Minimize Obsolete and Rotten Data

Obsolete and rotten data in Microsoft Sharepoint is not only a data security or privacy risk, but can also hamper the accuracy and freshness of answers provided by Microsoft Copilot. As employees would increasingly rely on Copilot, the impact of such answers can be significant. 

Securiti provides advanced capabilities to find duplicate and near-duplicate files.  Also, graph rules can be configured using Data Command Graph to find obsolete files based on various attributes such as file content, age of files, access and modification patterns, file ownership, etc.

Additionally, with Securiti’s labeling policies, you can automatically label these files to ensure Microsoft Copilot excludes them when generating answers.

With these steps, we help you automate SharePoint data security and governance, allowing employees to benefit from Copilot’s productivity features without compromising your data security.

Harness the Power of Microsoft 365 Copilot
with Securiti

Our goal at Securiti is to help you reduce the overall Data+AI risk and speed up adoption of AI Copilots like Microsoft 365 using the power of contextual Data+AI intelligence and automation.

Additionally, Securiti Data Command Center extends beyond data security in Sharepoint or M365 environments, enabling you to secure data+AI everywhere across on-prem, hybrid, SaaS and multi-cloud environments. As the number one ranked DSPM and a pioneer in AI Security & Governance, the solution reduces the cost and complexity of automating data+AI security controls.

To learn more about how Securiti AI can enable the safe adoption of Microsoft Copilot and secure data+AI everywhere, watch our on-demand DSPM demo now.

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