What is Office 365 governance? How does it affect Microsoft 365? What kinds of things do we need to be aware of? And then, ultimately, how can CoreView help with that?
So, we all know that Microsoft Office 365 is a wonderful blessing that has changed the way we do business in the Microsoft realm for the better. It has been a true game changer—the cloud has made us able to work remotely through these difficult times. It's given us the power to maintain the business product. At a time when we weren't sure, that could be feasible, it's been a great adventure. There is certainly chaos involved with that adventure, as any good adventure would entail.
And let's talk about what that looks like. What is the chaos of Office 365? Well, as we all know, Microsoft is a pretty significant investment. The ability to do what we do daily in the cloud does not come without a cost-from simply the cost of licensing to the cost of maintaining our applications and our business processes.
We've got sensitive content in our enterprises. That lives in the cloud now and goes all across the entirety of the stack.
So this could be anything from social security numbers within an Excel spreadsheet to a particular medical record or information in an email to government classified information or proprietary classified information in a word document.
And then when you extrapolate that out to various workloads that govern and maintain those document types, from OneDrive to Exchange Online, to SharePoint, to Microsoft Teams, which aggregates all those concepts into one workload.
You start to see the web of potential security risks. Having sensitive data all across your entire enterprise can be a troubling notion.
So it's fantastic that we maintain, uptime and we can continue to see the bleeding edge of the newest and greatest capabilities and features. But it also means we have to kind of play a racing game to keep up with the changes that are taking place.
It's one thing in the old days when we controlled the servers, right? We were in charge of everything.
Now the keys are in another pocket and we have to work with the 365 development and cadence to maintain those changes.
So let's talk about what our imperatives are, given those particular tiers of chaos, so to speak. You know, we hear the term "governance" quite a bit, and governance can theoretically mean a lot of different things, depending on who you ask and what time you ask them.
But generally speaking, we can kind of boil it down to one focused statement. And that statement is that its governance is how it should do what it does. It does what it does, but how should it do what it does?
So, governance is specifically concerned with ensuring that our organizations operate effectively.
IE, we get the job we're in, and we're entitled to do well with optimum efficiency. We're efficient; it happens in realistic timeframes that make sense for our business needs and in a compliant fashion. That means we. Adhere to the standards and protocols of compliance.
So compliance is kind of a sister term, the other side of the coin, so to speak, to the governance topic.
So let's dig into that just a little bit more to ask what compliance means. What are the processes that we utilize to adhere to standards, guidelines, decisions, regulations, or policies?
We define the policies that we need to adhere to, and the process of adhering to them is compliance.
We have to stay compliant. Now, these policies can come from a variety of sources.
They can manifest in different ways and come from external sources.
So, both internally and externally, we have this concept of policy, and compliance is the measure of adhering to those policies.
So let's bring all this together and kind of just look through it with a magnifying glass.
The main question we have to ask ourselves as IT professionals is - "Are the native Microsoft admin tools that we have at our disposal flexible?"
To manage Microsoft 365 effectively, in an efficient way, and in a compliant manner for our specific business needs. When we talk about this in a little bit more detail, you know, in terms of policies, anything that is unenforced is just a wish. That's not a policy. It becomes a policy when we start to enforce those wishes.
It's one thing to want. To have as few admins as possible in our environment. It's another thing to enforce that we have as few admins as possible in our environment. Visibility knowledge, as we all know, is fantastic, but action is even better.
It's one thing to understand inventory and get Intel. But what we do with that Intel is the definition of governance. Taking consistent action is even
Things like automation and alerting notifications in quasi-real time or even real time, like an enforceable policy, and maybe most importantly, the remediation factor, continual automated remediation.
So dealing with things ad hoc and getting that three o'clock in the morning call to jump online and address some fire is one thing, but of course, using our capabilities to our advantage, mechanizing, robotizing, and creating a real automated set of remediation, uh, protocols is going to be the most efficient and optimum.
So how can CoreView help with this? Well, our platform improves IT efficiency by giving you capabilities that will lend themselves to all the things I've discussed. Automation, intelligence reporting, the whole rigmarole. We're going to be able to drive costs from the IT perspective and to mitigate risk all across the entirety of the Microsoft 365 stack, whether we're talking about enforcing controls on data within a one.
From enforcing controls on emails, from an Exchange Online perspective, SharePoint sites, Microsoft Teams, the sky's the limit. So if you want to know more, or if you want to talk to one of us on the team, feel free to submit a demo.
