Collaboration governance planning through Zero Trust
Unsurprisingly, many workplaces have switched to fully remote or hybrid work. We know how stressful and confusing it can be collaborating with internal and external business stakeholders while ensuring your important business data is kept secure. Since collaboration is at the heart of productivity, safety controls should not hinder communications or make digital processes less efficient. This has been a challenge in the past, but recent advances in cloud technology are changing the game.
The digital world has enabled the removal of economic and financial barriers internationally, which has steadily increased the rate of outsourcing. Companies are progressively looking to subcontract resources to reduce costs and increase their cultural diversity. While this might be commercially viable, it also increases potential cyber risk, particularly when work teams are collaborating across geographical borders. Sharing documents, working on projects, and sending emails are among the many day-to-day tasks different teams need to complete. Doing this in a productive, streamlined, secure way is vital for business continuity. Many organizations are looking to optimize this by implementing a diverse and integrated tool set.
How to facilitate secure collaboration without sacrificing productivity
We can relieve your stress and assist in securing your organization’s collaborative workspace through a host of Microsoft 365 cloud services. Using Microsoft solutions, including advanced tools, enables you to respond intelligently and plan for collaboration governance.
Microsoft provides a suite of productivity services that work together to provide collaboration experiences with data governance, security, and compliance capabilities. The diagram below is a great depiction of the interrelatedness between internal and external teams and the different tasks they respectively handle.
Microsoft 365 supports three main communication methods:
- Outlook (Exchange Online): collaboration through email with a shared group inbox and calendar.
- Microsoft Teams: a persistent-chat-based workspace where you can have informal, real-time, conversations around a variety of topics, organized by specific sub-groups
- Yammer: enterprise social experience for collaboration.
It’s important to plan for cyberattacks to ensure organizational data is protected. Collaboration governance is how you manage users’ access to resources, compliance with your business standards and the security of your data. Services such as Microsoft 365 groups, Teams and Yammer empower users and reduce the risk of shadow IT by providing the tools needed to collaborate. Microsoft 365 has a rich set of tools to implement any governance capabilities your organization might require.
What does governance mean for Microsoft 365?
Governance planning is about developing a company strategy to ensure your valuable information is secured whilst minimizing risk and costs to the business. This involves various stakeholders of the business to collaborate in a coordinated response to align and adapt with the overall evolution of the technology.
1) Information Assurance: managing content throughout the life cycle, treating information as an asset – understanding business goals and regulatory requirements
2) Operational Assurance: ensuring the platform is performing well and operational – Microsoft assists with this
3) Outcomes Assurance: ensuring site and team owners have the right information and guidance to make sound decisions for their desired outcomes
Secure collaboration governance in Microsoft 365
To increase the ability to uniformly manage user access, ensure security and service compliance needs, implementing Microsoft 365 tools is a necessity. Working with the right partner can make a huge difference! Aegis Innovators can help you understand all you need to know about productive, secure collaboration, including how to implement a Zero Trust framework and therefore establish best practices for collaboration governance.
It can be largely overwhelming and confusing as your business starts its governance planning process though it is important to consider best practices like aligning with your business priorities; balancing risks and benefits by reviewing your business, regulatory, legal and compliance needs; defining roles and responsibilities and consider how you would implement the governance plan with a phased approach.
The good news is that we can support you during this process and can help you create your governance plan by:
- Understanding your business goals and processes
- Understand settings in your services
- Planning to manage user access, communications, and compliance settings
- Planning for your organizational and lifestyle governance
- Creating a change management solution for your company to ensure end user impact is seamless and minimal
- Measuring the success of the governance plan through an analysis of your infrastructure
Ultimately, we aim to empower your teams to work faster and smarter using tools that will help them communicate seamlessly.
At Aegis Innovators we want to ensure that not only your IT infrastructure is secured, but also, ensure that your teams are equipped with the correct fundamental knowledge to assist in reducing company risk and optimising your collaboration governance plan. Whilst governance planning and implementation comes first, it is essential that it is revisited continuously as your data estate changes over time, becoming larger and more complex. This means you will need greater oversight to ensure compliance.
Get in touch with us today.
This blog was originally created by Aegis Innovators and posted in our partner Sherweb’s website as part of our cobranding alliance.
https://www.sherweb.com/blog/security/implementing-zero-trust-framework-secure-collaboration/
