Mohamed El Nemr, Modern Workplace, and Security Business Group Lead for Microsoft Emerging Markets while announcing several new capabilities across its compliance offering said, “Compliance is crucial for businesses to achieve optimum output in the new normal. Enabling secure remote work, addressing regulations and uncovering new risks is now more of a reality”. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many consistent challenges have been experienced by businesses. With so many remote workers, people are creating, sharing, and storing data in new ways – fostering productivity, but this has also introduced new risks. And this is not just an assumption. A recent Microsoft poll revealed that providing secure remote access to resources, apps, and data is the key concern for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs).
With penalties and fines for non-compliance set at a maximum of €20 million or 4% of a company’s annual global turnover–in an industry that is ever-changing, it is in the best interests of organizations to remain continually complaint. As such, to assist companies in better protecting their data, mitigate risk, and address compliance regulations, especially in this time of flexible work, Microsoft has announced several new capabilities across Microsoft Compliance. In addition to the talent shortage and complexity of compliance management, customers also face the need to comply with an increased volume and frequency of regulations, with hundreds of updates a day globally to thousands of industry and regional regulations. Additionally, the complexity of these regulations has made it challenging for organizations to know which specific actions to take and the impact of these.
Compliance Manager offers a vast library of assessments for expanded regulatory coverage, built-in automation to detect tenant settings, and step-by-step guidance to help businesses manage risk. The feature also translates complex regulatory requirements to specific technical controls and through compliance score, provides a quantifiable measure of risk assessment – bringing together the existing Compliance Manager and Compliance Score solutions in the Microsoft 365 compliance center. The Compliance Manager provides a comprehensive set of templates for creating assessments, to help organizations comply with national, regional, and industry-specific requirements governing the collection and use of data. To provide greater visibility into an organization’s data, wherever it lives, new connectors have been made available that can pull data from other apps into Microsoft Compliance (including Microsoft Information Protection, Insider Risk Management, Communication Compliance, and eDiscovery) to help companies reason over, protect and govern that data.
Having the right data protection and governance approach is critical to not only addressing regulatory compliance but also to mitigating risks around data leakage. The extension of Microsoft data loss prevention solutions to Microsoft Cloud App Security is a new capability that extends the integration for DLP policy-based content inspection across connected applications such as Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Webex, One Drive, and SharePoint. This extension of Microsoft data loss prevention solutions to MCAS will help users to remain continuously compliant when using popular native and third-party cloud apps and helps to ensure sensitive content is not accidentally or inappropriately shared.
With Microsoft Teams’ usage growing with the shift to remote work, organizations are looking for seamless integration in order to keep their data and employees secure and compliant. With the volume of business conversations occurring round the clock in the solution, additional security and compliance features have also been added. We are well into a new era of business which has already brought with it the need for new processes and prerequisites. These new capabilities will only go a long way in ensuring that Microsoft customers across the continent and globally remain compliant.
