One of the top compliance challenges companies face is the sheer volume of information regulators publish. In fact, the 2020 Thomson Reuters Cost of Compliance Report noted that their own regulatory intelligence team logged 56,624 updates from 1,000+ regulatory bodies in 2019 alone. That's an average of 217 regulatory alerts every single day. The challenge is real.
The same report noted that compliance processes and a lack of in-house compliance skills were critical concerns for companies. Perhaps that is why the number of companies that said they would outsource their compliance functionality grew from 28% in 2019 to 34% in 2020.
Managing Your Compliance with Microsoft 365 Compliance Center
The IT environment today is quite dynamic. Data security and compliance must align to ensure the ongoing efficiency and legal operations of the organization. The Microsoft 365 Compliance Center and eDiscovery applications are a comprehensive, cost-effective solution that delivers the tools needed to meet today's compliance and governance challenges.
The Microsoft 365 Compliance Center capabilities extend into measuring, monitoring, and continuously updating your compliance profile against security frameworks and regulatory standards that your organization needs to align to, including NIST 800-53, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPPA compliance validation against your Office 365 tenet. You can also assess risks through the compliance manager, protect and govern your data with sensitivity and retention labels, search for relevant data pertaining to legal matters or data privacy compliance requests, respond to Data Subject Requests (DSARs), and access additional compliance and privacy solutions.
The Microsoft 365 Compliance Center's home page is a card section, which gives you a snapshot of your company's data compliance posture, lists solutions that are available to you, and displays a synopsis of active alerts.
From the card section, you can:
- Access the Compliance Manager solution, which can help you simplify the way you manage compliance.
- Calculate your risk-based score, which measures your progress toward completing suggested actions that can help you lower your risks around data protection and regulatory standards.
- Analyze workflow capabilities with built-in control mapping to help you effectively execute improvement actions.
- Link to a selection of integrated solutions you can use to manage end-to-end compliance scenarios with capabilities and tools, including a combination of policies, alerts, and reports.
- Review a summary of the most active alerts, including a link to where you can view more detailed information, such as severity, status, and category.
- Add additional cards, like the one depicting your organization's cloud app compliance, or showing data about users with shared files that have links to Cloud App Security, and much more.
4 Key Benefits of the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center
Four of the key benefits of using the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center to help you reduce compliance risks and increase your IT infrastructure security are:
- Provides visibility into your compliance posture against key regulations and standards on the home page.
- Allows you to perform risk assessments and follow step-by-step guidance to enhance your compliance and privacy controls.
- Enables you to label data more accurately and analyze and validate how sensitivity and retention labels are used with Microsoft 365 Label Analytics previews.
- Helps you identify compliance risks across applications, discover shadow IT and monitor employees' non-compliant behaviors with Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS) insights.
Get Help With Compliance
At CrucialLogics, we can conduct a comprehensive appraisal of your company's compliance posture and evaluate your current state of security against Office 365. We can help implement, assess and deploy security/compliance frameworks, identify gaps and help remediate them for you. There is a small additional cost, but it is less expensive than hiring one of the Big 4 consulting firms, using a costly platform that isn't Microsoft compatible, or buying a separate license with consulting. Our team can also help with HyperCare™ Managed Compliance, allowing for continuous updates and currency of your compliance score so you're always up-to-date on your security posture.
Why go outside when all you need is Microsoft? Talk to us to get two free hours with our Advisory services. We can quickly assess your compliance position, identify an action plan and help you get to your remediation goals. Let's talk.
"… it would be a potentially very unwise time to reduce the budget available for risk and compliance. There will be competing priorities, but in troubled times, firms need a well-resourced, highly skilled compliance function more than ever." – The Thomson Reuters Cost of Compliance Report 2020
