Privacy Management for Microsoft 365 is here!

Data privacy regulations are becoming more complex, and new laws are constantly surfacing, making it challenging to stay ahead.

Most businesses across the globe will soon have their data covered under a modern privacy regulation.

Managing the responsibility of staying up-to-date and compliant can be manual, costly, and tedious. With that in mind, Microsoft has announced Privacy Management for Microsoft 365 to help businesses keep personal data safe and build a resilient environment.

Key features

Identify critical privacy risks and conflicts

Locating where personal data is stored is reportedly one of the biggest challenges when managing privacy, mainly when the environment is unstructured. You’d be surprised how many companies are still manually dealing with data inventory and mapping through email, spreadsheets, and face-to-face. Privacy Management consistently determines where and how much private data is stored in your Microsoft 365 environment, and it does this by using data classification and user mapping intelligence.

You’ll have a comprehensive view of your privacy posture, including the amount, category, location of private data, and any privacy risks and trends.

Automate privacy operations and respond to subject rights requests

Privacy Management collects data signals from the 365 suite of solutions to produce actionable insights, enabling your business to automate privacy policies. This can be done by using:

• An out-of-box template
• Data transfer
• Data overexposure
• Subject request management
• A custom policy to meet business-specific needs

Encourage employees to make smarter and more informed data-handling decisions

We educate and test our employees with cyber security awareness training to ensure their cyber savviness, encourage informed security decisions and create a solid security-based culture.

The same principle applies if you want to achieve a privacy-resilient culture; employees need to be educated on handling data correctly. Privacy management provides insights and contexts that enable your business to automate privacy policies and protect critical data.

Data owners are also given recommended actions, training and tips to guide them in making better data-handling decisions.

Greater visibility beyond Microsoft 365

Data doesn’t just sit in one place; it is dispersed across clouds, systems and applications, so data privacy requires insights and complete visibility. Microsoft has built APIs that integrate with your existing processes and solutions to automatically create and manage subject rights requests in Privacy Management.

Microsoft has partnered with leading privacy software companies to extend subject-right management capabilities for personal data stored outside of 365. This will enable your business to respond unified to subject requests.

Take advantage of new regulation assessments in Microsoft Compliance Manager

Staying ahead of data privacy regulations doesn’t have to be challenging. Microsoft Compliance Manager provides over 200 regulatory assessment templates covering global, industrial, and regional Data Protection and Privacy regulations. The assessment templates have also been mapped with privacy-specific controls, which helps your business scale compliance efforts.

Privacy Management for Microsoft 365 is now generally available as an add-on to Microsoft 365 or an Office 365 subscription. To get started, contact our Microsoft Gold Certified team today.