A SharePoint permissions audit generates a lot of data. It rarely generates a plan. Most remediation projects stall somewhere between the export landing in your inbox and the moment someone has to decide which of the thousands of rows to act on first.
Someone reviews the spreadsheet, flags a few obvious problems, and saves the file back to SharePoint. Six months later, the same issues are still there - plus new ones the next audit will find.
The issue is not that audits are useless. They are essential. The issue is that knowing what is wrong and having a process to fix it are two separate things, and most organisations invest heavily in the first without thinking through the second.
This post is about the second part: what to do with your findings, in what order, and how to avoid the same pile-up twelve months later.
The Report Is Not the Fix
A permissions export gives you a snapshot. It tells you which users have access to which sites, libraries, and items at the moment the report was generated. What it does not tell you is which of those permissions are wrong, which are outdated, and which to address first.
That interpretation step is where most remediation projects collapse under their own weight.
Why Remediation Projects Stall
Three patterns come up repeatedly. First, the volume problem: a medium-sized SharePoint tenant can return thousands of permission entries in a single report, and without a triage framework, teams try to review everything and finish nothing.
Second, the stakeholder problem: fixing permissions often means removing access from people currently using the system, and before you revoke anything, you typically need sign-off from the site owner, the department head, or both. Without a clear escalation path, these reviews stall waiting on approvals that never arrive.
Third, the structural problem: teams jump to revoking individual users without first fixing the underlying permission structure. This means they spend time revoking someone from a subsite only to discover that the parent site re-grants access through inheritance anyway.
The fix for all three is the same: a prioritised, structured approach that starts with the highest-risk items and works systematically down the list rather than trying to clean everything at once.
How to Prioritise SharePoint Permission Fixes After an Audit
Start with risk, not volume. A permission granted to an external guest on a sensitive document library is a higher priority than an internal user being in the wrong group on a team site. Sort your findings by risk tier before you start revoking anything.
The order below is a practical starting framework:
- External access to sensitive content. Guest accounts with access to finance, HR, legal, or other sensitive libraries. These carry the highest breach risk and are often the easiest to justify removing quickly.
- Stale external users. Guest accounts that have not accessed SharePoint in 90 or more days, regardless of what they have access to. Inactive access is low-effort to revoke and reduces your external footprint immediately.
- Broken permission inheritance on sites and libraries. Locations where someone broke inheritance to grant a one-off exception, and that exception has since grown stale or created unintended cross-access. Fix the structure before addressing individual users in those locations.
- Overly permissive shared links. "Anyone with the link" type links that were created for convenience and never revoked. These are invisible in most per-user reports and require a separate link audit to surface.
- Internal group membership issues. Users in groups that no longer match their role. Lowest urgency in most environments, but important for accurate access governance over time.
Work through the tiers in order. Do not start on internal group cleanup while external access problems remain open.
Fix Broken Permission Inheritance Before Revoking Users
This is the step most admins skip. The instinct when you see the audit results is to start revoking people. Do not start there if you have broken inheritance in the picture.
When permission inheritance is broken on a subsite, library, or folder, that location manages its own permission list independently of its parent. Revoking a user from the parent site does not remove their access to the child location, because the child no longer inherits from the parent. You can spend hours revoking users from the site level without actually closing the access you intended to close.
What Broken Inheritance Looks Like in Practice
A project site was created three years ago. Midway through the project, someone needed to share a single document library with an external contractor. Rather than creating a sharing link, they broke inheritance on that library and added the contractor directly. The project ended. The contractor's access was never removed. The library still has a unique permission list, the contractor's guest account is still active, and neither the site owner nor IT is aware that this access point exists.
This is not an unusual scenario. It is a common side-effect of SharePoint's flexible permission model and the lack of a formal decommission process for project sites.
Before you start revoking user accounts, use ShareMaster's broken permission inheritance guide to identify every location in your tenant where inheritance has been broken. Review those locations first. Restore inheritance where the unique permissions are no longer justified. Then proceed to user-level revocation knowing the structural problems are closed.
Remove Shared Links Separately from User Accounts
Revoking a user's guest account in Microsoft Entra ID closes their direct site and library access. It does not touch shared links.
If that user was given access via an "Anyone with the link" sharing link, that link continues to function after the account is deleted. Anyone who has the URL can still access the document or folder. The link is not tied to a specific recipient; it is tied to the content.
This is one of the least understood aspects of SharePoint permissions. Teams revoke guest accounts, believe they have closed the access gap, and leave live anonymous links pointing at the same content. The sharing audit and the user access audit must be treated as separate tasks.
After you have your link inventory from the SharePoint shared links audit guide, prioritise "Anyone with the link" type links on sensitive or restricted content. Those can be revoked in bulk without affecting any specific user's direct permissions.
Build a Repeatable Cadence, Not a One-Off Sprint
Here is the uncomfortable reality: SharePoint permissions are not a problem you fix once. They are a condition you manage continuously.
Every new project site created, every contractor invited, every shared link sent, and every employee who changes role adds to the permission picture. Without a regular review process, the gap between your permission posture and your intended access policy grows back within months of a cleanup. The audit findings that took your team three weeks to address will regenerate in nine months if the process stops there.
Three practical steps build a lasting cadence:
Connect remediation to offboarding. The largest driver of stale permissions is employees and contractors who leave the organisation with SharePoint access that is never revoked. Tie the access review step directly to your offboarding checklist. When someone's last day is entered in HR, that triggers a permissions review for that account within SharePoint, not just an account deletion in Entra ID.
Schedule quarterly external access reviews. Block a recurring review of all external guest accounts in the Microsoft 365 admin centre, filtered to accounts that have not logged in within 90 days. This is a single, consistent task that prevents the stale-guest backlog from accumulating between annual audits.
Document what you changed and why. A permissions remediation is only as durable as its paper trail. Log each change: what permission was removed, from which site or library, on what date, and on whose authority. This documentation matters when a user raises a support ticket claiming they lost access, when an auditor asks what actions were taken, and when you hand the responsibility to a colleague.
The goal is not a permission environment that is perfect. The goal is one where problems are caught and addressed within a known timeframe, with a clear record of what was done. That is achievable with a consistent quarterly cadence and the right reporting tools.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the correct order to fix SharePoint permissions after an audit?
Fix structural issues first: repair broken permission inheritance before revoking users. Then remove stale shared links. Then revoke external user accounts. Finally, clean up internal group memberships and orphaned site ownership. This order means you are not revoking users against a broken permission structure that will re-grant their access anyway.
Does removing a user from Entra ID revoke their SharePoint shared links?
No. Deleting a user account closes their direct site access but does not invalidate shared links. "Anyone with the link" type links in particular stay live after the account is removed. Shared links must be explicitly revoked separately through SharePoint's sharing management or a tool like ShareMaster.
How often should SharePoint permissions be reviewed after an initial audit?
External access quarterly, at minimum. Internal permissions annually, or after major organisational events such as a merger, acquisition, or offboarding wave. The initial audit gives you a baseline; scheduled reviews catch drift before it accumulates into the same problem again.
The Report Master permission export gives you the raw data for each of these steps: a full permission matrix by site and library, external user lists, and sharing link inventories. Start there before any remediation begins.