As the volume of data organizations deal with continues to increase, data compliance is becoming more and more of a priority. Compliance is necessary for any organization trying to prevent harmful incidents or violations of regulations, which may result in lawsuits, fines, or damage to a company’s reputation. Microsoft Compliance Manager helps manage your organization’s compliance by protecting data, ensuring controls are implemented, and helping you stay abreast of regulations.
What is Microsoft Compliance Manager?
Microsoft Compliance Manager is a feature in the Microsoft 365 compliance center. It makes compliance management easier and more streamlined by helping you measure compliance-related information via a dashboard, and giving your organization a compliance score.
The tool collects information and flags any problems, which helps compliance officers and other personnel solve compliance issues more quickly, and take a preventative approach. Compliance Manager offers:
- Pre-built assessments to meet standard compliance regulations
- Custom assessments of a company’s specific compliance demands
- Identification of issues and suggested improvements
- A compliance score
Compliance Manager is available to clients currently licensed for Enterprise Mobility + Security E3, Office E3, or Microsoft 365 E3 or you can try the Microsoft 365 E5 Compliance suite. Microsoft 365 E5 Compliance capabilities and features are included in the Microsoft 365 E5 license.
Compliance Manager Demo
Watch MessageOps provide a demo of Microsoft Compliance Manager to help you get compliant, stay compliant, and scale compliance. The Compliance Manager segment starts at 10:39 minutes of this video.
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Why do organizations need compliance?
The list of regulatory bodies, and the regulations they impart, is growing. In 2022, organizations need to meet regulations around GDPR, taxation, license and permitting, pollution, health and safety, discrimination—to name but a few. For some industries—the food sector, or pharmaceuticals for example—compliance regulations are woven into almost every business process and have to be enacted by all departments. For the modern workforce, compliance management is a necessary part of life.
With all these regulations to bear in mind, the job for compliance officers can seem overwhelming. A 2017 report by Thomson Reuters showed that 26% of firms spend a whole day a week monitoring regulatory changes.
Microsoft Compliance Manager helps ease the burden of work for compliance officers and other personnel by helping monitor, assign, and flag compliance issues, and fast-track the compliance auditing process—giving employees more time back in their week.
What are the benefits of Microsoft Compliance Manager?
Track your compliance score
Compliance Manager allows you to perform ongoing risk assessments for compliance regulations—a compliance score—which provides visibility around your compliance status (if it drops, compliance officers are able to quickly assess why). The compliance score is calculated using action scores, with each control assigned a weight based on the level of risk. This ensures that higher risk actions are prioritized, and provides a good indication of compliance progress over time.
Unite compliance information
Organizations often have a difficult time recruiting talent with the necessary expertise regarding their industry’s compliance, as well as around technology. Compliance officers have in-depth knowledge of their industry’s regulations, and IT teams understand how to protect company data. But these teams are usually siloed, which makes meeting compliance regulations across the board a difficult and disjointed process. With Microsoft Compliance Manager, information can be combined to provide better visibility over a whole range of compliance obligations. It creates transparency across the process, making an organization’s compliance profile visible to multiple employees.
Fast-track the compliance process
With so many steps involved, and regulations to adhere to, compliance management can be a complicated process. With Microsoft Compliance Manager, users can assign and monitor compliance actions, and flag those which need to be prioritized. This takes the load off compliance officers and other personnel, and speeds an otherwise manual process. Compliance Manager also makes collaboration easier across teams, which speeds up managing documents or creating audits. The tool allows you to create multiple assessments a regulation, which provides a more streamlined and collaborative way to manage compliance issues.
Solve standard and custom compliance issues
Microsoft Compliance Manager helps organizations monitor both standard and more nuanced compliance issues. The compliance requirements for every business will be different and vary dramatically across industries, but ensuring your organization is compliant in every way it should be is difficult. Compliance Manager provides both standard pre-built assessments—for common industry or regional regulations—and custom assessments for more unique compliance needs. This simplifies the assessment process and helps compliance officers better manage the complexities of implementing regulations.
Get started with Microsoft Compliance Manager
Here are steps on how to get started with Compliance Manager.
Compliance is a complex beast. A lack of it can be detrimental to business operations, but the sheer number of regulations makes this process difficult to manage. Compliance officers must keep abreast of industry and regional changes, while also implementing regulations and ensuring they are monitored. Effective compliance management with Microsoft Compliance Manager helps you manage compliance needs with ease, flag issues quicker, and provides visibility across your organization’s compliance journey.
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