Imperva announced SecureSphere for SharePoint, a data security solution to help businesses protect sensitive data stored in Microsoft SharePoint. The product addresses the unique security requirements of SharePoint's file, web and database infrastructure, giving businesses visibility and analysis of data access and safeguarding so that only users with a legitimate business need have access to data.

SharePoint is a widely-deployed enterprise collaboration tool. Although collaboration with SharePoint increases the value organizations get from their unstructured data, protecting broadly accessible SharePoint data from internal and external threats is an ongoing challenge.

User access rights to SharePoint data often do not align with business needs, leaving sensitive data vulnerable, and extranet and public-facing SharePoint web sites face traditional web-based threats and hackers.

"While we might have a fairly good handle on structured data in databases, we don't have this same knowledge about what's in our file shares and in our collaboration systems," said Neil MacDonald, VP & Gartner Fellow. "To securely enable the sharing of sensitive information via collaboration, we first need to understand what is being shared, how and when it is being shared and with whom it is being shared. However, most organizations don't have this level of visibility, creating a significant security blind spot."

SecureSphere for SharePoint features include:

Access Rights Visibility, Audit Trail & Policy Control: Aggregate and consolidate user rights across SharePoint sites, files and folders; continuously monitor file activity and respond when data access deviates from corporate policy.

Data Owner & Stale Data Identification: Use file and folder access patterns to identify data owners and provides better compliance with security standards; identify and archive or delete data stored in SharePoint that is not being used, reducing management overhead and increasing available data storage.

Web Application & Database Security Protection: Protect SharePoint against current and future online security threats such as SQL injection; monitor and/or block access to SharePoint's Microsoft SQL database to limit access to users with a legitimate data use.