How to build a SharePoint Permissions Report?

Limitations of native SharePoint permission reports

Permission management in SharePoint is often left to the various department heads across an organization, who all too often assign unique permissions directly to a user instead of assigning them to a group. Therefore, enabling audit of SharePoint permissions changes is essential for IT administrators who are responsible for ensuring that no insiders or external attackers can compromise sensitive data.

Using built-in SharePoint permissions reporting tools, you can configure site collection audit settings and export security audit report into an Excel file via PowerShell or ECP. However, the native SharePoint user permissions report won’t provide you with easy-to-read details of each event. For instance, if someone was added to a SharePoint group, such as Farm Administrators, instead of being able to quickly identify who exactly was added to the group and who made this change so you can respond appropriately, you’ll have to spend significant time struggling to put the pieces of the puzzle together. So how can you spot abnormal activity in time and enable granular investigation of incidents that could threaten your valuable SharePoint content?