Microsoft 365 access reviews tighten enterprise file-sharing controls and directly answer how organizations can stop unmanaged sharing in the cloud. By introducing systematic, periodic validation of permissions, these reviews give security teams a practical method to prune stale access and reduce data-exfiltration risk.

What happened – On September 18, 2026, Tenfold Software announced a no-code Identity & Access Governance (IGA) extension for Microsoft 365 that adds automated access-review capabilities to the platform. The solution targets the chronic problem of unmanaged sharing across Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint, where permissions often outlive their original business purpose.

Microsoft 365 access reviews improve governance

  • Global link report – SharePoint Advanced Management can list the sites with the most new sharing links in the last 28 days, but it provides no context about who accessed the links or why they were created.
  • Site-level CSV export – Administrators can pull a table of every shared file per site, yet scaling this across hundreds of sites quickly becomes a manual, error-prone exercise.
  • Survey data – A recent industry survey found that 61% of security leads see shared-file access persisting longer than intended, and more than a third cannot reliably identify current recipients.

These limitations force security teams to stitch together fragmented reports, guess at intent, and spend valuable time hunting for stale permissions.

Why access reviews matter

Unmanaged sharing is a tangible data-exfiltration risk. When a freelancer leaves a project but retains SharePoint folder access, or when a Teams channel expands without revoking prior members' rights, sensitive documents can drift into the wrong hands. The only reliable way to confirm that access is still needed is to ask the original granter – a process that becomes untenable at scale without automation.

Access reviews create a feedback loop: owners receive periodic prompts to validate each permission, approve legitimate continuations, or revoke unnecessary rights. This reduces the attack surface by ensuring that every external or internal user’s access is justified on a regular cadence.

Tenfold’s approach – a centralized governance dashboard

Tenfold’s IGA add-on plugs into Microsoft’s cloud and on-prem APIs to aggregate sharing data into a single pane of glass. Two features set it apart:

  1. Unified content breakdown – A high-level view lists shared items by app (Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint) with drill-down capability to object-level details. Icons flag files that are shared outside their native container, instantly highlighting potential over-exposure.
  2. Streamlined review workflow – Owners can approve or deny access directly from the dashboard. The system logs decisions, creates audit trails for compliance, and can auto-escalate items that remain unreviewed after a configurable deadline.

By eliminating the need to run separate reports for each site, the solution saves weeks of analyst effort and provides continuous, real-time insight into who can see what.

Operational impact for enterprises

  • Reduced audit fatigue – Security operations centers can replace manual CSV reconciliation with automated alerts, freeing analysts to focus on genuine threats.
  • Compliance alignment – Regulations such as GDPR, CCPA and industry-specific mandates (e.g., HIPAA) require demonstrable control over data access. Tenfold’s audit logs satisfy many of these evidentiary requirements without custom scripting.
  • Risk mitigation – Early detection of anomalous sharing patterns—such as a sudden surge of external links from a single user—triggers immediate investigation, potentially averting data leakage incidents.

Remaining challenges and caveats

While the add-on improves visibility, it does not replace the need for robust data-classification policies. Organizations must still define what constitutes sensitive information and ensure that classification tags propagate to the sharing engine. Additionally, the solution relies on accurate ownership metadata; if files are orphaned or owners are mis-assigned, reviews may be directed to the wrong personnel, creating bottlenecks.

Tenfold’s announcement reflects a wider industry shift toward continuous entitlement management. Vendors are moving from periodic, manual audits to real-time, policy-driven enforcement. As Microsoft expands its Graph API capabilities, third-party IGA platforms will likely gain deeper hooks into conditional-access policies, enabling automated revocation when risk scores exceed thresholds. Enterprises that adopt these tools now will be better positioned for upcoming regulatory updates that emphasize least-privilege principles.

Actionable steps for security teams

  1. Map current sharing hotspots – Use the native SharePoint link report as a quick sanity check to identify high-traffic sites.
  2. Pilot an access-review workflow – Start with a single department (e.g., finance) and configure Tenfold’s review cadence to 30 days. Measure reduction in stale permissions.
  3. Integrate audit logs with SIEM – Correlate review outcomes with user-behavior analytics to spot outliers.
  4. Educate owners – Provide concise guidance on how to interpret the dashboard icons and the importance of timely responses.

By institutionalizing these practices, organizations can transform cloud sharing from a blind-spot into a controlled, auditable process.

For official Microsoft documentation on native access-review capabilities, see the Microsoft Learn portal.

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