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 a manual, costly and tedious task.

With that in mind, Microsoft have 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

When it comes to managing privacy, locating where personal data is stored is reportedly one of the biggest challenges, particularly when the environment is unstructured. You’d be surprised just how many companies are still manually dealing with data inventory and mapping through the likes of email, spreadsheets and face-to-face. Privacy Management works to consistently determine 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 which will include the amount, category and location of private data, along with any privacy risks and trends.

Automate privacy operations and response 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 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 to create a strong security-based culture.

The same principle applies if you want to achieve a privacy-resilient culture, employees need to be educated on how to handle data properly. Privacy Management comes equipped with insights and contexts, which enables your business to automate privacy policies and protect critical data.

Data owners are also given recommended actions, training and tips to guide them on 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 which is why data privacy requires insights and full visibility. Microsoft have built API’s which integrate with your existing processes and solutions to automatically create and manage subject right s request in Privacy Management.

And to extend subject right management capabilities for personal data stored outside of 365, Microsoft have partnered with leading privacy software companies. This will enable your business to have a unified response 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 which covers 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 with compliance efforts.

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