Microsoft Copilot
Glossary
Permission drift
Permission drift is the gradual build-up of unintended or excessive access rights as users, roles and resources change over time without matching access reviews or cleanup.
Also known as: permission creep, access drift, permission sprawl, stale permissions
How access drifts
People change teams and keep their old memberships. Projects end and their guests stay. A file is shared once with a large group to meet a deadline. Each grant made sense at the time, and nothing removes it afterwards. Over years the access in a tenant drifts far from what the organization would approve if asked today.
How to counter it
Drift is countered by regular access reviews, in which owners confirm or remove access, by removing access automatically when someone leaves or moves, and by policies that detect broad or unusual grants as they appear. A one-time cleanup helps, but without the routine the drift starts again the next day.
Where Rencore fits
Rencore runs access reviews for Teams, Microsoft 365 groups, SharePoint site collections, Power Apps, flows, Power BI workspaces and Viva Engage communities, and its policies flag broken permission inheritance, groups with disabled user accounts and Teams with inactive external users between reviews.
