February 17, 2021

Ensuring security, compliance and governance in Microsoft Teams

Introduction

The Modern workplace is more fluid today and no more tied to physical locations. Intelligent solutions like Microsoft Teams are helping the mobile workforce to collaborate efficiently over long distances and in a fast-paced environment. The way Microsoft Teams continues to build high-performing teams in organizations globally, only depicts the user-friendliness and resilience of the platform and impervious security around it.

For a remote workplace to offer unobstructed workflows using collaboration apps, IT needs to scale its data security across devices and networks and ensure that minimum standards of security, compliance, and governance are met.

Further, in this blog, we will discuss how MS Teams is secured and compliant and why it still needs good governance in place. Let’s start:

Security in MS Teams

Teams enforces team-wide and organization-wide two-factor authentication, single sign-on through Active Directory, and encryption of data in transit and at rest. Files are stored in SharePoint and are backed by SharePoint encryption. Notes are stored in OneNote and are backed by OneNote encryption. The OneNote data is stored in the team SharePoint site.

Also, because MS Teams works in conjunction with SharePoint, OneNote, Exchange, and more such applications, you can easily configure security in Microsoft 365 for enhanced security.

Compliance in MS Teams

MS Teams is built upon Microsoft 365 architecture and follows a regulatory framework that meets international, industry, and regional standards. Compliance offerings by MS Teams include – ISO 27001, ISO 27018, EU Model Clauses (EUMC), GDPR, FINRA, HIPAA Business Associated Agreement, SSAE 16 SOC 1 & SOC 2 Reports, FedRAMP Moderate and High, and Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST).

Additionally, all information that flows in MS Teams is managed by Exchange and SharePoint and hence complies with the same protection rules. This enables strong features in MS Teams such as:

  • Auditing and Reporting
  • Legal Hold
  • Archiving and Retention
  • Compliance Content Search
  • eDiscovery
  • Data Loss Protection
  • Advanced Threat Protection
  • Business Information Barriers
  • Windows Information Protection
  • Conditional Access and Intune MAM

Governance in MS Teams

Microsoft 365 is a universal toolkit designed to empower distributed workforce to work together creatively as teams in an environment that is highly secured and compliant. And therefore, MS Teams, which runs on Microsoft 365 infrastructure, is inherently secured. Then why does it need governance? What if we do not consider governance before using Microsoft 365 cloud services?

Organizations that use cloud services for their businesses, store confidential corporate data in the cloud which needs additional security setup. Without good governance, this data is still hackable. Besides, home networks and BYOD devices open doors to data breaches and cyber threats such as stealing of user’s identity and gaining access into an organization.

To prevent such revolting scenarios, appropriate governance policies are set to ensure –

  • Efficient deployment due to less wasted time and effort so that your organization derives the maximum benefit of new technologies faster.
  • Greater Return on Investment (ROI) while controlling your organization’s Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
  • Identification of necessary and unnecessary components in your organization.
  • Successful transition to newly adopted Microsoft 365.
  • Mitigation of risks from accidental changes, sync errors, or malicious actions to team processes.

To know how to make cloud governance a success, click here.

This is to understand that security and compliance between Microsoft and an organization is a shared responsibility. Where Microsoft is responsible to protect the service, an organization’s job is to detect and classify sensitive data and protect data, identities, and devices.

Hence, every organization needs to set collaboration controls such as global settings, user-specific configuration, etc., as per their existing internal processes and business mandates. Configuring governance policies and privileged access block any potential malicious incidents inside an organization.

Moreover, an organization will need additional policies for teams lifecycle management that includes archiving and deletion of teams and data associated with teams through channels and files. Governance in MS Teams also includes enforcing naming conventions to teams, defining user’s ability to create teams, configuring user access control to various resources, applying protection to shared files in and out of the organization and so on.

Scale MS Teams governance through automation

Considering a third-party governance tool is a good idea to keep MS Teams environment in control when it faces an outgrowth. As such automating complex and time-consuming manual tasks can simplify administration and keep users focused on valuable or high-priority tasks.

With this regard, TeamsHub by Cyclotron is designed to automate MS Teams and other Microsoft 365 workloads that streamlines governance, and facilitates strategic collaboration that drives end-user engagement and overall productivity through a unified interface.

Using TeamsHub by Cyclotron, you can simplify operations such as administration management, site provisioning, lifecycle management of teams, teams labeling and classification, guest collaboration, the security of content, reporting and analytics, voice routing, and much more.

To know more about TeamsHub by Cyclotron, please visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com to request a demo

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