Microsoft 365 Compliance Features

Introduction

A cloud-hosted environment must be cyber-resilient to foster risk-free culture and collaboration. Microsoft 365 (previously, Office 365) has a robust system in place to fulfill the legal, regulatory, and technical compliance requirements of a business. The Microsoft 365 Compliance Center comes with a variety of features to ensure the protection and governance of critical corporate data. The built-in controls and capabilities in Microsoft 365 allow you to perform and manage many tasks securely.

Further in this blog, we will take a quick view of the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center home page and the powerful compliance features that are available. Later, we will also discuss the compliance gap that occurs due to the rapid adoption of Microsoft products such as Teams and ways to bridge it. Let’s begin –

Microsoft 365 Compliance Center Overview

Microsoft 365 Compliance Center is a specialized workspace that enables security and risk management specialists to use Microsoft 365 intelligent security solutions for identity and access management, security management, threat protection, and information protection.

1. The homepage

The homepage in Microsoft 365 Compliance Center displays the summary of how your organization is keeping up with data compliance and the available solutions to assess compliance risks and posture. The homepage allows you to:

• Analyze your company’s progress through the Microsoft Compliance Scorecard, by calculating a risk-based score toward completing recommended actions that reduce risks around data protection and follow regulatory standards.

• Review the Solution catalog card which has an entire list of integrated solutions to enable management of end-to-end compliance scenarios.
• Review the Active alerts card which contains detailed information such as Severity, Status, Category, etc., on most active alerts and a link.

2. The left navigation panel

The default items available on the navigation panel on the left are:

• Home: Return to the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center’s main page.
• Data classification: Access trainable classifiers, sensitive information type entity definitions, content, and activity explorers.
• Data connectors: Configure connectors to import and archive data in your Microsoft 365 subscription.
• Alerts: View and resolve alerts.
• Reports: View data about label usage and retention, DLP policy matches and overrides, shared files, third-party apps in use, and more.
• Policies: Set up policies to govern data, manage devices, and receive alerts. You can also access your DLP and retention policies.
• Permissions: Manage who has access to the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center to view content and complete tasks.

3. The Solutions section

Use the links in the Solutions section to access your organization’s compliance solutions. These include:

• Catalog: Discover, learn about, and start using the intelligent compliance and risk management solutions available to your organization.
• Audit: Use the Audit log to investigate common support and compliance issues.
• Content search: Use Content Search to quickly find an email in Exchange mailboxes, documents in SharePoint sites and OneDrive locations, and instant messaging conversations in Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business.
• Communication compliance: Minimize communication risks by automatically capturing inappropriate messages, investigating possible policy violations, and taking steps to remediate.
• Data loss prevention: Detect sensitive content as it’s used and shared throughout your organization, in the cloud, and on devices, and helps prevent accidental data loss.
• Data subject requests: Find and export a user’s personal data to help you respond to data subject requests for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
• eDiscovery: Expand this section to use the core and Advanced eDiscovery for preserving, collecting, reviewing, analyzing, and exporting content that’s responsive to your organization’s internal and external investigations.
• Information governance: Manage your content lifecycle using features to import, store, and classify business-critical data so you can keep what you need and delete what you don’t.
• Information protection: Discover, classify and protect sensitive and business-critical content throughout its lifecycle across your organization.
• Insider risk management: Detect risky activity across your organization to help you quickly identify, investigate, and take action on insider risks and threats.
• Records management: Automate and simplify the retention schedule for regulatory, legal, and business-critical records in your organization.

Understanding compliance gaps and vulnerabilities

It is the age of remote work. Employees are using Microsoft 365 suite rigorously. Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, etc. are the daily work tools of employees today. As the multitude of teams is created by a large number of employees, unstructured content is also growing at an unprecedented rate. This gives rise to many issues viz content sprawl, shadow IT, data loss, and more.

As a result, it gets difficult for the compliance team to accurately map Microsoft 365 architecture which constantly shifts and grows. This further generates overlapping circles of access to files causing inconsistent permissions and access issues. The entire scenario makes cyber auditing, breach reporting, and DSARs more challenging.

Why is governance critical?

This is why you need to implement governance by configuring additional policies to secure your Microsoft 365 environment. In other words, governance is a way to equip your business to mitigate pervasive threats and fully secure your confidential information. Using governance, you can enable site provisioning to keep teams growth under control, determine users’ access rights and privileges, manage external collaboration, grab Microsoft 365 usage reports to detect activities and trends around Microsoft products and services.

How automation resolves governance challenges

For administrators, governing Microsoft 365 ecosystem manually with complex shell scripting repeatedly is a backbreaking job. And hence, using an automation tool such as TeamsHub by Cyclotron instead can work wonders for your business.

TeamsHub by Cyclotron simplifies Microsoft 365 or Office 365 governance by streamlining workflows and automating administrative tasks so that you can deliver the best employee experience while keeping the collaboration platform stable, secure and compliant.

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