When considering data, a business is subject to compliance and governance rules – either internally or externally enforced – about how it is handled. For instance, financial records are legally obliged to be kept for HMRC review for 7 years, while other records may have a shorter or longer lifespan depending on the content and what it relates to.
It is therefore vital that an organisation has a rigid mechanism in place for managing data. Not only will you avoid potential financial penalties (or worse) for non-adherence but automating your governance process takes a lot of the burden away from your employees. Auditing and transparency become far easier to achieve if intelligent technology is implemented to govern your information landscape.
Some questions you want to consider around compliance and governance are:
- How do we apply governance policies to all data?
- How can the IT team manage business compliance requirements?
- How can I demonstrate compliance?
OfficeLabs deploys tools such as the Microsoft 365 Purview compliance portal which can help answer all of these. It allows you to apply sensitivity labels to your data, ensuring that only people with the right level of access can access it. Advanced eDiscovery Services let you identify, locate and retrieve records for legal purposes, while content from Exchange mailboxes, OneDrive locations and SharePoint sites can all be exported and this unstructured data can then be interrogated.
Data governance functionality in Microsoft 365 builds on this by introducing retention labels. These can be set at an organisation level and attached to individual files rather than the location they are in – which means if a file is marked to be deleted or archived in 3 years’ time it will be, regardless of whether it’s in an email inbox, a Teams chat or a SharePoint site.
For an even more robust solution OfficeLabs also offer Gimmal Records Management, which provides full lifecycle management of your records along with robust auditing and reporting and many other features.
Legislation such as GDPR will become far easier to comply with when you employ the right tools, and OfficeLabs is happy to advise on the best governance strategy for your organisation. Get in touch on 01392 240365 for a discussion, or fill in the Contact Us form below, and we’ll discuss options for implementing a robust compliance model.
If you are also looking for assistance with other aspects of Information Management, click on one of the below links for further information.
