Areas to address in Microsoft 365 Governance: A planned approach

Introduction

Designing governance policies for Microsoft 365 is about mapping business requirements and goals with appropriate cloud services and platforms. Before rolling out any new system, it is important to integrate governance policies in a framework to establish the RACI matrix of people, processes, and technology. This ascertains minimal security risks while allowing the most flexibility and productivity of the platform to let users enjoy collaboration.

Every enterprise has its own unique governance requirements. As always start by taking small steps first – focusing primarily on areas that are most important. This lets the changes percolate gradually and also gives users sufficient time to adapt to a new working environment.

In this blog, we will quickly share basic governance parameters first which align with all types of organizations regardless of their size and structure. Later, we will discuss a framework depending on the services being utilized in an organization. Let’s start –

• Change management: This helps users to adapt to new organizational restructuring, business processes, and working habits for successful transition to Office 365.
• Licenses: This allows you to choose right Office 365 licensing from a vast number of packages depending on unique business needs.
• Security management: This enables you to fulfill security requirements of Office 365 tenant including access control, data governance and cloud DLP.
• Service access management: This provides granular access control over privileged tasks in Office 365 to prevent exposure of sensitive corporate data.
• Risk analyses: This helps in identifying potential IT threats, its impacts and costs of risks as well as defining recovery strategies.
• Device management: This helps an organization to protect its resources and data on devices.
• User management: This defines role based access to provide unique permissions and capabilities to users to enhance IT security.
• Compliance: This enables you to manage compliance features across Office 365 in your organization.
• Training and user adoption: This helps your users to onboard quickly by providing them guides and resources using Microsoft’s best practices.

Moving on to an ideal governance framework appropriate for your business needs, we suggest evaluating the following areas before rolling out Office 365 –

1. Ownership, roles, and responsibilities

Development of a permission strategy delegates permissions and tasks to users with right level of access. Segmenting users into administrators, owners, team members and guests allows you to provide the most suitable role to each user with appropriate level of control.

2. Site provisioning

Let not the Office 365 workloads be created without a reason or purpose. Develop a structured process to create teams, sites, groups, etc., through provisioning. Ensure that the tenant is explored and utilized within organizational rules.

3. Access Control

Enable controls or policies to govern how users access content or resources of an organization. Maintain a complete control over corporate data by customizing access levels to various users including guests and limit sharing of content whenever necessary.

4. Sharing

Implement controls to govern external file sharing. Keep track of confidential documents whenever shared with people outside of your organization. Ensure that the content is encrypted before exchange and the access to it is revokable on detection of a suspicious activity.

5. Archiving

Control the information lifecycle from creation to archival and disposition. Reduce the risk of information overload or loss by applying expiration policies. Archive content when not in use or delete it after specified days when project is over. This helps you to get full data visibility and enhance better organization of workloads.

6. Monitoring

Monitor all activities across Office 365 tenant using advanced analytics and reporting. Grab smart insights into all workloads like Teams, SharePoint, Yammer, etc. to check usage and adoption. Get actionable reports in real-time for making quick and informed decisions to prevent future threats.

Foster collaboration by automating Microsoft 365 governance

As collaboration requirements change as per business needs, managing and monitoring a multitude of teams, departments, and applications using complex scripting or manual effort get tedious and error-prone.

Microsoft 365 automation leverages new levels of efficiency to eliminate operational IT errors caused manually. By automating configurations and policy settings, you can empower your administrators with time-saving tools such as TeamsHUB by Cyclotron and improve key operations by cutting down man hours while reducing security risks.

If you want to learn more about TeamsHUB by Cyclotron, please visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com to request a demo