Introduction

Microsoft continues to build trust with customers in safeguarding their personal data by introducing a quintessential feature called Privacy Management for Microsoft 365. The solution is aimed to modernize privacy by applying the latest innovation and intelligence to operationalize privacy management.

Businesses face an uphill battle to keep up with ever evolving privacy laws and changes in legislation. Additionally, majority of them rely on manual processes for data discovery i.e., understanding what volume of data they have stored and where. As such, grabbing actionable insights in an unstructured data environment challenges data-workers to maintain digital privacy.

Privacy Management for Microsoft 365 resolves this issue by simplifying privacy management using automation and helping organizations to gain end-to-end visibility into privacy risks. Privacy management offers many tools to –

• Mitigate privacy risks such as data overexposure, data oversharing and data transfers
• Detect the travel path of personal data
• Empower information workers to effectively manage data and make smart decisions while working with personal data
• Manage subject right requests and respond to them easily

Privacy management is available within Microsoft 365 compliance center and can be purchased by organizations with Microsoft 365 E3, E5, A3, A5 and Office 365 E1, E3, E5, A1, A3, A5 subscriptions.

How privacy management helps organizations

Let us discuss key features of privacy management tool that helps organizations to overcome privacy issues –

1. Visualize personal data

Using privacy management, organizations can discover personal data and assess risks by gaining key insights and analytics. It helps admins to locate the data storage, traverse the path where data flows and identify data trends over time. These insights are generated on a dashboard that displays Overview and Data Profile. Overview captures data trends and provides automatic updates about data whereas data profile displays analytics to explore privacy issues and actions to remediate them.

  To learn more, please visit Find and visualize your personal data.

2. Establish policies to manage risks

A complex data environment where data is overexposed, transferred aberrantly, and accumulated in one location unused, poses risk scenarios. For such data hoarding issues, a policy can be created for each of them and tailored to meet specific conditions.

Additionally, you can inform users about the outcomes of the issues and teach them to manage risk mitigation. Policy management provides customizable templates for enforcing ongoing policies. Using this, you can evaluate personal data, receive alerts on policy violation and trigger mail notifications to users about taking an action to remediate.

To learn more, please visit Manage privacy risks with policies in privacy management.

3. Manage subject rights requests

The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) allows individuals some rights to access their personal data such as passport number, social security number, and so on that a company has collected about them. Hence, it enables individuals, referred to as data subjects to submit a request called data subject access request (DSAR) to the company, referred to as data controller.

Privacy management has made it much easier to respond to such requests using customizable workflows. Privacy management provides an automated solution to keep track of all requests and even create a request to grab customer’s or employee’s details. Additionally, scope for granular search can also be defined through search settings.

Subject rights requests solution retrieves data from throughout your Microsoft 365 tenant automatically, identifies data conflicts and presents reports for administrator’s review.

You can draw other users from Teams to collaborate around this request. In data collected, you can choose specific items to include in the report and redact personal information which you don’t want to share.

Microsoft also provides built-in Power Automate templates to integrate the process with other solutions. This helps to customize actions for subject rights requests, add calendar reminders and create request records in ServiceNow.

To learn more, please visit Manage subject rights requests.

Conclusion

Microsoft has modernized privacy management to unified and scoped experiences for data owners and information workers who handle personal data. Moreover, Microsoft has integrated it into apps that we use daily. This serves as great support to admins to implement a strong security posture. Like privacy management for Microsoft 365, TeamsHub by Cyclotron has been providing similar features for maintaining data security and privacy using custom policies, smart insights, and advanced analytics for some time now. Whether collaborating internally or externally, data remains protected while it travels, thoroughly monitored, and effectively controlled by administrators.

To learn more about these features, please visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com to request a demo