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UC Today: Microsoft Teams – How Do You Stay Compliant?

By December 27, 2022January 11th, 2023No Comments
Microsoft Teams How do you stay compliant UC Today 1 1

 

Maintaining compliance in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams has rapidly emerged as one of the most popular tools for productivity and collaboration in the digital world. More than 270 million people use Teams every month to share data, insights, and ideas. The challenge for businesses migrating into the Teams landscape is figuring out how to preserve and adapt their compliance and security strategies in a new world of work.

The good news for today’s company leaders is Microsoft Teams innately has security and compliance in mind. Built in the Microsoft cloud, Teams shares the same advanced security features as the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem.

However, to fully ensure consistent compliance among team members, businesses still need to ensure they have the right strategy for leveraging Teams.

Step 1: Explore How Teams Manages Data

First, it’s worth understanding how Microsoft Teams protects, manages, and stores collaboration data. With Teams, companies can implement team-wide and organization-wide two-factor authentication, extensive encryption, and single sign-on capabilities. It’s also possible to set policies for how data is managed and stored.

As standard, data from Teams is collected and resides in the geographic region associated with each Microsoft 365 organization. Companies with specific data sovereignty requirements can find which region hosts their data within the “Organization profile” section of the admin center. Organizations can also choose to store which data they collect with individual data retention policies.

Retention policies allow businesses to determine which information needs to be kept from content and communications and set specific dates for when stored data is deleted. Plus, in-built Data Loss Prevention capabilities govern the ecosystem’s sharing of information and files. Companies can set DLP policies to stop documents from being opened by guests and prevent external sharing.

Step 2: Apply Security Strategies to Teams Conversations

To assist companies in maintaining secure and compliant conversations throughout in-office, remote, and hybrid landscapes, Microsoft has a range of security and compliance controls available. These solutions allow organizations to implement rules for their Teams communication strategy.

For instance, users can block certain staff members from contacting each other during an internal investigation. “Information Barriers” can prevent entire groups from communicating with each other and allow businesses to set policies related to things like eDiscovery and chat lookups. It’s also possible to dictate what users can do when communicating in Teams, such as editing or deleting messages, sharing screens in video meetings, and using virtual backgrounds. Rules are set on a per-user or conversation basis or for the entire team.

Companies using Microsoft Teams to connect with customers can use the “Customer Key” to add an additional layer of encryption on top of Teams media messages, calls, chat messages, meeting recordings, and chat notifications. It’s also possible to apply sensitivity labels to protect specific pieces of content from guest access and external sharing.

Step 3: Leverage the Purview Communication Compliance Portal

The Microsoft Purview Compliance Portal integrates directly with Microsoft Teams and the other tools companies might leverage for communication and collaboration. This solution provides business leaders with an immediate insight into their “compliance score” and risk level based on factors like information governance, access control, and device management.

Companies can use the Purview Compliance portal to examine active alerts showcasing their most significant threat issues. It’s also possible to set specific controls for how data is managed by your organization and run regular assessments to examine your security standing in different areas.

Purview Compliance Manager gives control over eDiscovery and legal hold options, data loss prevention, communication compliance, mobile application management, and more. There are pre-built assessments for common industry and regional standards to explore and workflow capabilities to help users complete risk assessments rapidly. The “Improvement Actions” included within Purview also offer recommended guidance on how businesses can adhere more carefully to industry and regulatory standards.

 

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