Typical roles and responsibilities include data owners, stewards, custodians, and consumers, guided by a data governance committee. Individual organizations will, of course, adapt these roles according to their needs and organizational maturity.

Data Owner

The data owner refers to the person or group with authority and accountability for a specific dataset. Usually a senior manager or business leader, data owners define business requirements and rules for the data. They also establish quality standards and metrics and approve data policies and procedures.

For example, a marketing director owns customer data, overseeing customer segmentation, targeting, and personalization strategies. Likewise, a product manager owns the product data, driving the product development, launch, and feedback processes.

Data Steward

Data stewards include those responsible for implementing data policies and procedures. For instance, a data steward will help monitor data compliance with established regulations and internal standards. They may also educate the workforce on how to access, use, and share data to ensure compliance with privacy and security best practices.

Data Custodian

Data custodians oversee the technical aspects of data management. This includes the processes surrounding data storage, and well as backup and recovery, data access, and quality control.

For example, database administrators manage the databases that store the data, ensuring optimization and security. Data analysts, on the other hand, perform queries and reports on data using tools such as SQL or Python. Their insights and recommendations support decision making.

Data Consumer

Data consumers, as the name suggests, use data for a variety of purposes, from decision making to innovation. They play a key stakeholder role in data governance, as they have specific needs and expectations regarding the quality and availability of the data.

For example, marketing managers leverage data to personalize marketing campaigns. Or product managers developing new products collect data regarding user behavior to inform decisions about features to include.

Within the data governance framework, data consumers have responsibility for providing feedback and identifying issues. These may include issues such as errors or inconsistencies within the data set. They may also include problems with accessibility or data silos that diminish data value.

Data consumers also play a critical role in data security and compliance. By complying with security best practices and policies for data use, they help reduce risk.

Coordinate Data Governance Roles and Responsibilities to Drive Business Goals

The data governance committee includes stakeholders from across the organization. This committee oversees the implementation and maintenance of the data governance program. They begin by defining the vision and goals relating to the organization’s data, as well as the responsibilities of data owners, stewards, custodians, and consumers.

The committee will develop and approve data policies and procedures, ensuring they align with the company’s business goals and compliance requirements. They monitor and measure the performance of data governance activities. And they identify both risks and opportunities for improvement. Importantly, they serve as data champions.

For example, a healthcare organization’s data governance committee oversees the quality, privacy, and security of patient data across different departments. Likewise, a retail company’s data governance committee coordinates the collection and integration of customer data from various sources.

Jumpstart Data Governance Strategy with Expert Guidance

Effective data governance requires building data strategies one piece at a time. The data experts at eMazzanti Technologies and Messaging Architects will help your organization implement a structured and comprehensive program to reduce risk and increase data value.

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Information governance encompasses the overall strategy for information across the organization. This includes identifying, categorizing, and storing data. It also involves managing information lifecycles, ensuring data security and supporting eDiscovery and regulatory compliance.

IT governance, on the other hand, ensures the technical foundation and support for information governance. By implementing information governance and IT governance in coordination, organizations optimize their use of information assets. At the same time, they improve risk management, ensure regulatory compliance and drive innovation.

Data Management

Data holds tremendous potential to provide insights, improve decision making, and inform strategy. At the same time, the sheer velocity of data poses challenges. Organizations ingest huge quantities of data in various formats from a wide range of sources. But if people cannot find and access quality data when they need it, it holds little value.

IT governance supports data management by providing the tools, policies, and processes to ensure data quality and availability. This includes supporting the classification and storage of data as well as controlling information access and sharing. It also involves enabling effective and responsible archiving and destruction of data.

For example, IT governance establishes the data architecture necessary to ensure that all team members can access accurate information, regardless of their location. It also provides data analytics and visualization tools to enable data exploration and reporting.

Risk Management

Any business activity entails risk that can negatively impact the company’s performance, reputation, and even its bottom line. Insufficient cyber security measures introduce the risk of data breach, for instance. Likewise, natural disasters and ransomware can interrupt business continuity and result in crippling data loss.

Risk management requires IT governance to provide the necessary resources and processes to enable risk identification, analysis, and response. For example, effective IT governance provides for risk assessments to identify potential vulnerabilities of IT systems and processes. It will also include the implementation of strategies and controls to close security gaps moving forward.

Additionally, risk management must include implementing data backup and recovery procedures as part of an overall business continuity strategy. And once the organization has identified risks and initiated mitigation strategies, ongoing IT monitoring enables timely resolution of any issues.

Compliance Management

Effective risk management forms a critical component of overall compliance management. Regulatory compliance plays a critical role in avoiding legal penalties, maintaining trust, and achieving competitive advantage. For many organizations, compliance challenges provide the initial motivation for developing and implementing information governance programs.

Here again, IT governance supports compliance management by providing necessary systems and processes to enable compliance evidence and improvement. This includes policies and procedures around data privacy and security. It also includes a strong reporting component to establish proof of compliance with applicable legislation and industry standards.

Innovation

Data plays an increasingly important role in guiding innovation. For example, by analyzing data from various sources, the company can understand what customers need and value. Data also provides insights into gaps and opportunities in current product offerings. With these insights, the organization can then design and deliver solutions specifically targeted to customer needs.

IT governance supports data-driven innovation by fostering a culture of experimentation and collaboration while providing the necessary resources and guidance. This often includes delivering the guidance and structure to responsibly and successfully leverage emerging technologies such as AI.

Optimize Use of Information Assets with Effective IT Governance

By coordinating IT governance and information governance, organizations increase the value of data assets while reducing risk, achieving compliance, and supporting innovation. This requires ensuring that IT infrastructure and operations are automated and integrated where feasible. It also involves using best practices to enhance information security, quality and availability.

Consider seeking external guidance and support as you develop your governance strategies. For instance, the consultants at eMazzanti and Messaging Architects bring a wealth of experience and tools to help you unlock the power of data for your organization.

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However, implementing effective information governance requires careful planning and coordination. And it takes time. Organizations should start with a comprehensive data audit to inform next steps. Leveraging information governance consulting services will streamline the process.

Assess Your Current State and Future Data Goals

To begin with, the organization must learn what data it has and where it lives. An initial data audit will develop a picture of data across the enterprise. The audit includes components such as:

• Data mapping – The organization must identify where data lives and how it is stored. This will include understanding information infrastructure elements such as document libraries. It will encompass all storage locations, whether on premises or in the cloud. And it will involve identifying sensitive data.
• Determining data quality – Duplicates, outdated information, and data silos all affect the quality of data. Likewise, access issues affect the usefulness of data. If the right people cannot find and access the information they need quickly and securely, the data holds little value.
• Assessing data processes and policies – Determine what information policies exist and whether they are enforced. These include policies for accessing and sharing data as well as policies for retaining and destroying information.
• Evaluating information security – A cyber security assessment reviews the policies and security controls governing information storage, movement, and access. And it evaluates existing security measures against regulatory requirements, industry standards and business needs.

With an understanding of the current state of information, the organization can define its vision and goals for information governance, aligning those goals with business needs.

Locate and Classify Data

Data classification proves foundational to good information governance. Sensitive and important data may be hidden in documents, meeting minutes, emails, chats and more. Labeling sensitive data allows data stewards to track that data and apply essential protections such as encryption and sharing restrictions.

Manually locating and tagging data proves difficult if not impossible at scale. But AI-powered tools automate the process of finding and classifying data wherever it lives. Properly classified data simplifies regulatory compliance and eases the eDiscovery process.

Define and Implement Data Lifecycle Policies

Data classification plays a key role in enforcing data retention and destruction policies. Regulations such as PCI DSS and HIPAA include strict rules around the minimum amount of time to retain certain types of information. On the other hand, information retained too long can become a liability.

Automating retention policies according to data type gives the organization a defensible way to maintain regulatory compliance. Because regulations and business priorities evolve over time, data stewards should regularly review and update retention policies.

Ensure Compliance Management

To address mandates from a wide variety of regulations, an effective information governance strategy should include regular compliance monitoring. eGovernance monitoring tools deliver visibility into sensitive data from a single console. Content alerts and reports allow for proactive remediation. And monitoring provides proof of policy demanded by many regulations.

Build Comprehensive Data Security

Data security works hand in hand with compliance monitoring as an essential element of information governance. While regulatory compliance mandates reasonable security precautions, organizations must move beyond checkbox compliance to protect against data breaches.

A risk assessment will highlight vulnerabilities and provide a basis for security planning. Security strategies must include ensuring proper access management. Endpoint protection, encryption, data backups, and multifactor authentication prove critical, as well. And organizations must address supply chain security and provide regular security awareness training for all staff.

Adapt Information Governance Strategy to Business Needs

Company structure, business priorities and specific industry requirements all play a role in information governance. Consequently, the optimal strategy will look different from one company to another. In every organization, however, effective information governance requires engagement of stakeholders and users throughout the organization.

eGovernance delivers a cloud-based information governance solution. Our consultants will work with your organization to design and implement an information governance strategy customized to your specific business needs.

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According to the IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average cost of a data breach in 2022 was $ 4.35 million. The report also found that 45% of breaches occurred in the cloud, with public cloud breaches costing the most. Thus, effective ISG makes financial sense.

Clear Vision and Action Required

The primary elements of ISG include:

• A clear vision and direction for information security communicated and supported by senior management and stakeholders.

For example, an organization can define its information security mission, vision, and values, and communicate them through a charter, a policy statement, or a code of conduct.

• A set of policies, standards, guidelines, and procedures that define the roles, responsibilities and accountabilities of information security functions and processes.

Thus, the organization establishes an information security policy framework that covers topics such as access control, data protection, and incident management.

• A mechanism to monitor, measure and report on the performance and effectiveness of information security controls and activities.
• A process to identify, assess and manage information security risks and incidents in a timely and consistent manner.

Thus, an organization should implement an incident response plan that defines the roles, procedures, and tools for handling information security incidents.

• A culture of awareness, education and training that fosters a shared understanding and commitment to information security among all employees and partners.

Organizations that conduct regular security awareness training and simulations to raise the level of security knowledge and behavior among staff and stakeholders reduce the risk and cost of a data security breach.

Protect Assets and Reputation; Increase Efficiency and Innovation

The benefits of information security governance extend beyond protecting information assets. Effective ISG enables organizations to:

• Protect information assets from unauthorized access, disclosure, modification, or destruction.

For example, effective ISG can prevent costly data breaches, cyberattacks, frauds and thefts that compromise confidential information and intellectual property.

• Enhance reputation and trust among customers, suppliers, regulators, and other stakeholders.
• Avoid lawsuits, investigations and sanctions that result from violating data protection laws, privacy regulations or contractual obligations.
• Improve operational efficiency and effectiveness by minimizing disruptions, errors, and losses.
• Achieve strategic goals and objectives by enabling innovation, collaboration, and agility.

Staff more readily leverage information assets to create new products, services or business models that enhance competitive advantage and customer satisfaction.

Information Security Governance Challenges

However, efforts to implement ISG often encounter challenges. For example, an organization may face difficulties in obtaining sufficient budget, resources, or authority for its information security initiatives if senior management does not prioritize their importance or value.

And an organization may encounter resistance or inconsistency in implementing its information security policies or controls. If different departments or teams have goals or interests not aligned or harmonized with the whole, it reduces their incentive to comply.

Additionally, some organizations may lack the necessary staff or tools to perform information security activities. If they don’t invest in recruiting, training, or outsourcing information security capabilities, they fall behind.

And organizations may face challenges in enforcing their information security rules or standards. This happens when employees or partners do not understand or appreciate the benefits or consequences.

Adopt a Holistic, Proactive, Continuous Approach

To overcome these challenges, organizations must adopt a holistic, proactive, and continuous approach to information security governance. They need to align their information security objectives with business goals and engage stakeholders in a collaborative dialogue.

Organizations must also allocate adequate resources and capabilities to their information governance and security functions.

Fostering a culture of awareness and accountability among employees and partners delivers long-term benefits. And adapting information security practices to the changing environment makes the process sustainable.

Information Security Governance Experts

Not a one-time project or a checklist item, the ISG journey requires constant vigilance, improvement, and alignment. By embracing ISG as a strategic imperative, organizations enhance their resilience, competitiveness, and success in the digital age. The eGovernance.com information security governance experts stand ready to assist.

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Consider the vast amount of sensitive data held by county governments. Without appropriate information governance, sensitive information related to local citizens and businesses could be vulnerable to breach. And when mismanaged data makes it difficult to fulfill public records requests, governments incur penalties and lose face with the public.

On the other hand, when that same county government manages, secures, and uses data effectively, they achieve critical goals of accountability, transparency and efficiency. Decision makers have reliable access to quality data, and public trust in the governing process increases. These same benefits apply to organizations in all industries.

What is eGovernance?

eGovernance refers to electronic governance, specifically governance of electronic information. As in the county government example above, common goals of eGovernance include improving data access, strengthening data security, driving efficiency and productivity and promoting accountability.

That is, organizations need to know what data they have, where it lives, who owns it and who can access it. They need to ensure that they data they own is high quality and secure from breach. And they need to achieve compliance with legislation and other regulations that govern data.

Information Governance Challenges

Today’s data environment poses significant challenges for information governance. In the first place, organizations collect massive amounts of data every day from many disparate sources. These include Teams documents, customer input from company websites, emails, meeting recordings, chat messages, data from IoT devices and much more.

Because information lives in so many different places, including BYOD devices and remote locations, identifying and securing that data proves challenging. At the same time, the regulatory environment grows more complex every year.

Technology trends such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence offer exciting capabilities. But they also complicate the cyber security environment and introduce new privacy and ethics concerns.

Finally, decision makers and data analytics tools need clean, trustworthy data. This requires comprehensive checks for duplicates, errors, and outdated information. It also requires a balance between facilitating data access and ensuring data protection and privacy.

eGovernance Solution Companies Best Practices Deliver Key Benefits

By following best practices for information governance, organizations do more than ease the path to regulatory compliance. They also reduce risk, ensure appropriate access to high quality data, and improve business planning.

An effective information governance program steps beyond checkbox compliance. For instance, in addition to ensuring the implementation of appropriate data security controls, proactive organizations will conduct penetration testing.

In addition, automating repetitive or redundant tasks such as tagging data and processing permission requests helps to reduce error. In fact, automation proves essential to managing an increasingly complex data environment.

As organizations migrate some or all their data to the cloud, they will need to adjust the tools they use to manage their data. Look for tools designed specifically to find and manage data across multiple clouds and on-premises environments.

Partner with eGovernance Solution Companies to Achieve Business Goals

An eGovernance solution company will help you choose and implement information governance solutions tailored to your business needs. The consultants at eMazzanti Technologies and Messaging Architects deliver a fully managed, cloud-based solution for preserving, discovering, and accessing digital data across your data environments.

Our data experts will begin by assisting you to build a comprehensive data and records management plan to reduce unstructured data and risk. A state-of-the-art archiving solution facilitates policy-based retention and destruction of data, regardless of Microsoft license type. Add our powerful eDiscovery tool and digital compliance solutions to gain the transparency, accountability, and efficiency your organization needs.

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Compliance involves addressing both cyber security and data privacy. Data retention and destruction policies also play a key role. Consequently, compliance best practices involve improving data visibility through information governance and monitoring. They also include updating data policies and security practices and addressing the human component.

Use AI to Strengthen Information Governance

Because achieving compliance requires that organizations know what data they have, where it lives and who has access to it, information governance plays an important part. For instance, several privacy regulations include the “right to be forgotten.” This means that a company must be able to find and delete an individual’s personal data upon request.

Additionally, rules such as HIPAA and PCI DSS mandate the careful control of sensitive data such as protected health information (PHI) and financial data. These regulations require that organizations locate and tag all sensitive data wherever it lives or travels. With vast amounts of data on multiple platforms, finding and tagging that data represents a monumental task.

Fortunately, AI and machine learning can help. The average company manages hundreds of terabytes of data, with new data created every minute. Humans cannot feasibly find and classify all sensitive data manually. However, using pattern matching and machine learning, automated AI tools can find and classify sensitive data quickly and accurately.

Gain Visibility Through Compliance Monitoring

To identify compliance gaps, organizations should conduct regular compliance and security audits. In addition, continuous compliance monitoring allows data administrators to proactively address any potential compliance issues. Here again, automation plays a critical role.

Much of a company’s most sensitive information hides in unstructured data such as emails, PDF files and instant messages. This data can prove difficult to manage. But automated tools, powered by AI, monitor both structured and unstructured data for compliance violations.

These monitoring systems deliver automated alerts to appropriate personnel while taking precautionary action. For example, if a user attempts to improperly share PHI, the system will block the action and alert compliance officers. In addition to keeping sensitive data safe, monitoring allows the organization to demonstrate compliance in the event of an audit.

Regularly Review Data Policies

Data policies play an essential role in compliance. For instance, policies mandate who can access data and how long data should be retained. They also govern how users can share data and with whom. And they may cover certain security actions, such as the encryption of sensitive data.

An effective electronic communications policy includes not just the written policy, but also the technology to enforce that policy. For example, tools such as Microsoft 365 allow organizations to automatically prohibit sharing or destruction of sensitive data. Data policies require regular review and updates as the regulatory landscape changes and as the company adopts new tools.

Implement Essential Cyber Security Practices

Because compliance requires keeping data safe and secure from unauthorized access, data compliance best practices necessarily include security measures. At a minimum, organizations should use firewalls, keep software up to date, change default passwords and implement both multi-factor authentication and encryption.

In addition, security teams should regularly review access rights and permissions. Apply the principle of least privilege to ensure that users have the minimum amount of access they need. And make sure to remove user accounts and access when no longer needed. Tools such as Microsoft Entra help to automate access and identity management.

Provide Compliance and Security Awareness Training

Regardless of the technology involved, no compliance or security effort will prove successful if it ignores the human component. Take time to engage employees at all levels through regular privacy and security awareness training. Complement the training with phishing simulations and internal events such as privacy awareness month.

Compliance Technology Powers Data Compliance Best Practices

With a rapidly evolving regulatory environment, compliance experts suggest taking a big picture approach to achieving compliance. That is, look for privacy solutions that apply to most privacy laws, rather than applying different rules to different locations in compliance with individual states.

Technology will prove essential to a successful compliance strategy. For instance, intelligent compliance solutions from eGovernance provide insight into all indexed data through a single portal. Automatic reports alert auditors whenever an issue arises, allowing for immediate remediation. Proactive intervention saves time and money while delivering peace of mind.

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Collect Massive Amounts of Data from Disparate Sources

Civil and criminal cases frequently hinge on digital evidence, and that can mean data requests involving millions of document files. With modern collaboration methods, those documents include everything from email and voicemail to word processing files, social media and more.

In addition to including many different types of files, eDiscovery must also address numerous data environments. For instance, employees may use both company-owned and personal devices, from laptops to phones and tablets. Additionally, the organization may store data both on-premises and in multiple cloud environments and numerous applications.

Legal teams must find efficient methods to locate, collect and process that data. This involves finding a balance between collecting all relevant information and yet avoiding a data dump.

With the right tools, legal teams can locate and assess the data in place before collecting anything. An early data assessment that involves an initial in-place review of data delivers several key benefits. Legal teams can identify and address potential roadblocks early on. They also avoid over-collection of data, saving significant time and money.

Prevent Digital Spoliation of Evidence

While gathering these massive amounts of data, legal teams must take care to prevent destruction of or tampering with relevant data. This includes altering or deleting documents in any way. Whether intentional or not, this destruction of evidence, or spoliation, can result in stiff penalties and cause enormous problems.

To avoid spoliation claims, the team must use defensible methods to collect and preserve data. A critical component of this involves legal holds. Once again, early data assessment plays a key role. When the legal team identifies potentially relevant information early on, they can immediately apply legal holds to protect that data.

Technology has simplified legal holds, allowing legal teams to automate the process of creating and sending legal hold requests and releases. Reliable legal hold technology also includes auditing capabilities that ensure defensibility.

eDiscovery Challenges to Ensure Data Security

When organizations collect huge amounts of data and send it outside the organization, they effectively lose control of that data. Consider the thumb drives and other copies of data held by opposing counsel and expert witnesses. Every copy of the data distributed represents a cyber security risk.

Organizations reduce that risk by mapping and indexing the data, making it possible to conduct a preliminary review in place. Done well, this will reduce the amount of data that needs to be collected.

Taking the process a step further, the organization can collaborate with outside counsel on keywords and other search criteria. They can then gather the data set into one place and grant outside counsel conditional access to run reviews and publish for litigation. Keeping sensitive data in house ensures that the organization retains control and can audit any access.

Address eDiscovery Challenges with Unique eDiscovery Solution

Locating, collecting, and preserving data in a defensible way can prove incredibly difficult and time consuming when organizations do not have control of their data. And because of the amount of data and the time involved, eDiscovery costs typically represent from 20 to 50 percent of the costs of litigation.

Proactive organizations meet eDiscovery challenges with a strong foundation of information governance, aided by the right technology. When companies know where data resides, who owns it and who can access it, eDiscovery becomes much less painful. Legal technology such as legal holds software and automated early case assessment further streamlines the process.

eGovernance provides a comprehensive eDiscovery solution to reduce discovery overhead and improve the speed and efficiency of managing requests across disparate systems. Our unique tools allow organizations to centralize eDiscovery. Whether legal counsel reviews data in place or extracts copies for more resilient retention requirements, the data stays secure.

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Evolving Privacy Regulations

Privacy law continues to drive information governance programs, and 2023 brings regulatory changes to key states. For instance, the California Privacy Rights Act amends the existing California Consumer Protection Act and takes effect on January 1.

The Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act likewise takes effect on January 1, followed by the Colorado Privacy Act on July 1 and Utah’s Consumer Privacy Act on December 31. In general, these laws apply to companies that conduct business in or offer products and services to residents of each state.

In fact, Gartner predicts that by the end of 2024, privacy regulations will cover the personal data of 75 percent of the world’s population. Rather than finding and securing personal data after the fact, organizations need to implement or strengthen privacy programs proactively.

Emphasis On Data Democratization

On the other hand, while a compliance mindset emphasizes restricting access to data, 2023 also brings an increased focus on data democratization. That is, data plays a critical role in decision making at all levels. Therefore, users in a wide variety of business roles, from sales assistants to executives, need ready access to quality data.

For employees to use data effectively, they need knowledge, as well as tools and access. Thus, data strategies must include data literacy education. Users need to know how to ask the right questions about data, where to find information and how to use it responsibly.

They also need the appropriate data tools, such as data warehouses and business intelligence (BI) technology, and knowledge about how to use them. And they need appropriate data access. This will involve approaching access management in a way that delivers the right access to the right people at the right time while ensuring compliance and security.

AI and Automation Will Prove Essential

Without automation, this increasingly complex data environment would prove impossible to manage. Consequently, automation—powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)—will prove increasingly essential in 2023 and beyond.

Automation plays a key role in finding and cleansing data, managing metadata, and performing other complex tasks with data. This both allows organizations to manage data at scale and empowers users to manage data on their own. It also helps to ensure regulatory compliance.

Hybrid and Multi-cloud Architecture is Here to Stay

Companies have been moving workloads to the cloud for several years. The pandemic accelerated cloud migration, and the trend shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, many companies spread important data assets across multiple clouds and on premises environments.

Managing data across these various environments can prove challenging and result in data silos. This fragmentation in turn leads to complications with data access and other information governance issues. Organizations will need to invest in technologies designed to find and manage data in a hybrid environment.

Metadata Management Remains Central to Effective Information Governance

Metadata will continue to play a central role in information governance. This “data about data” serves to identify and classify information, laying the groundwork for effective data management. For instance, metadata puts data in context and enables governance policies that determine data usage and lifecycle.

As organizations focus more deliberately on using data as a business asset, metadata takes on a greater role. But with large volumes of data arriving from a wide variety of sources, organizations must leverage technology to manage metadata effectively. For instance, AI can play a significant role in automating metadata management.

Translating 2023 Information Governance Trends into Strategy

Regulatory complexities, in combination with a hybrid work environment and the need for data democratization, will make for information governance challenges in the coming year. These challenges can feel overwhelming. But they become more manageable when organizations take a step-by-step approach.

A good first step to implementing an effective information governance strategy involves a comprehensive data audit. The audit will highlight what data you have and where it lives. Our consultants can also identify potential risks and help you implement a data management strategy designed to reduce risk and support business goals.

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Plan for Governance Success

The Goldilocks zone of good governance looks different for each organization. Ideally, Microsoft 365 assists companies with solving business problems and meeting organizational objectives. To that end, administrators need to take a proactive approach to designing and implementing an information governance strategy.

First and foremost, this will involve clarifying business needs and goals and then building a governance plan around those goals. Additionally, organizations need to understand applicable regulations and gain an understanding of existing security and compliance risks.

Organizations should also understand that eGovernance in Microsoft Cloud is dependent on licensing levels. For example, the features set available vary between the different licensing packages.

Define Retention, Email, and Data Security Policies

A key tool for governing information to reach business goals and achieve compliance involves policies. In the case of data retention, for instance, Microsoft 365 Records Management allows organizations to define data retention at both the folder level and the file level.

For example, administrators can create a retention policy to apply to all items in a SharePoint site or all messages on a channel. On a more granular level, they can apply retention labels to specific items, such as single documents or emails. Likewise, email policies discourage data pack rats and streamline eDiscovery.

Policies also provide protections for sensitive data. For instance, the organization can create policies to ensure that users do not accidentally share financial data or personally identifiable information.

Balance Productivity with Control and Security

In addition to increasingly complex tools, administrators must balance the need for productivity with a constantly evolving threat landscape and regulatory pressures. Microsoft 365 governance allows administrators to strictly control user access and automate policies for data sharing and retention.

These controls aid security and compliance. However, too much structure can lead to reduced productivity when users must deal with multiple logins and strict controls over sharing. This frustration may spark a rise in shadow IT as employees find ways to collaborate outside the approved applications.

Likewise, retention policies help to ensure regulatory compliance and protect vital information assets. But retaining too much data eats up storage space and creates chaos. Effective governance finds a sweet spot that protects the organization while driving efficiency.

Back Up Critical Business Data

Microsoft 365 includes a host of tools for collaboration, which store data in a variety of locations. For instance, users keep and share documents through SharePoint and OneDrive. Outlook mailboxes contain thousands of emails and appointments. And Teams stores chats and voicemails for future reference.

Microsoft 365 enables administrators to implement retention and destruction policies on specific data or locations. However, data not governed by such policies is subject to manual destruction and Microsoft does not maintain backups of data.

Therefore, organizations should look to third party backup solutions and determine how much of this data requires backup and how often to run backups. This varies, depending on business needs, industry regulations and applicable legislation, such as HIPAA. Data archive solutions should also be considered to provide long term compliance options.

Preserve Data Organization and Configuration

If businesses simply back up the data, without consideration for the way the data is organized, restoring from the backup would cause chaos. For instance, users often depend on a system of folders and subfolders in SharePoint to group like documents together and make them easy to locate. Backups should take that organization into account to allow for seamless restoration.

When backups also include configuration settings, it further eases the process of restoration. This is particularly true in the case an organization needs to rebuild much of the system after a ransomware attack. Configuration includes access management settings, library settings, sharing permissions and so forth.

Get More Microsoft 365 Governance Tips

Microsoft 365 offers powerful tools to empower collaboration, protect data assets, and support innovation. But powerful tools require fine-tuning and careful management. Understanding and properly configuring the options available requires training and experience.

The information governance consultants at eGovernance bring extensive experience in Microsoft 365. Along with powerful archiving, eDiscovery and Compliance solutions, they provide the Microsoft 365 governance tips and expertise organizations crave for success.

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Managed by the information governance experts at eMazzanti Technologies and powered by iPro, eGovernance.com solutions empower businesses to effectively manage their data with hosted solutions for electronic data discovery, security, and compliance.

Reduce Costs with Affordable Information Governance

A data breach poisons reputation and piles up recovery costs. And mismanaged information adds risk in an age governed by privacy regulation. Information governance supplies the controls, access, and protections required, now at a cost most businesses can afford.

When companies know where their data lives and who owns it, they begin to unlock its potential by putting it to work. And with comprehensive data security, categorization, and management across the life of the data, innovation flourishes.

In addition to enabling innovation, affordable information governance solutions deliver a host of business benefits, including:

• • Reduced eDiscovery costs
  • Reduced risk of a costly data breach or mishandling of sensitive data
  • Decreased overhead and liabilities arising from obsolete information
  • Increased productivity when employees quickly find needed data, rather than piling up repetitive or conflicting information
  • Faster access to useful business information resulting from improved organization

Affordable Data and Records Management

Data and records management means identifying, organizing, and cleaning up data to make it more useful.  Organizations benefit from solutions that cover the entire data lifecycle, beginning with a simple data audit and including sensible processes, policies, and procedures.

For example, data tagging enables the organization of strategic business information into suitable categories for eDiscovery. Tagging allows users to quickly and accurately search millions of emails and files to find essential information.

On the other hand, search solutions that return inconsistent results, work slowly, or become difficult to use often lengthen the eDiscovery process, resulting in increased costs.

With data properly organized, regulatory compliance becomes much easier, hence less costly. Data managers easily implement retention policies to automate archival and deletion of obsolete or redundant information. Likewise, the identification of sensitive data blocks unauthorized access or sharing and the loss of proprietary information.

Efficient eDiscovery

The cloud-based data indexing and eDiscovery platform from eGovernance^® simplifies the eDiscovery process. Its rich eDiscovery tools greatly aid in the distribution and collection of relevant data to improve the speed and efficiency of requests across multiple disparate systems and Office 365 licensing levels. eDiscovery teams work faster with reduced discovery overhead.

Legal teams empowered to create and track discovery cases, search, and export content without engaging IT. Even better, complex searches take just seconds to perform, because documents are classified with searchable tags and comments.

Cost-Effective Digital Compliance Management

Regulatory compliance has become a fact of business life, as inevitable as taxes. eGovernance^® Compliance solutions reduce compliance monitoring time and effort and enable internal investigations with no outsourcing. They deliver data visibility, both on-premises and in the cloud, through a single console.

In addition, eGovernance^® monitoring tools allow compliance/security teams to tackle all regulations simultaneously, including HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, SOX, PCI-DSS and more. Reporting options provide proof of policy and regulatory compliance. Further, users remediate all sensitive data automatically or manually from the same user interface.

Knowing the information you have and where it is aids discovery and records management. But from a security and compliance perspective, organizations both must know if there are breaches and be able to do something about them.

While some solutions stop data from being created that contravenes data compliance policies, a solution is also required that allows that content to be quarantined, reviewed, and moved. eGovernance provides compliance options to quarantine, review, delete, or return potentially suspicious documents and email residing in your systems.

Multi-layered Data Security Strategies

The perfect storm of cloud migration, increasing cyber-attacks, and remote work security challenges have left data more at risk than ever. Thus, data security forms a necessary and increasingly outsourced piece of an overall information governance strategy.

The experienced consultants at eGovernance.com have lived the transformation from closed data storage systems to cloud-based systems. They audit and identify potential security risks, then tailor multi-layered cybersecurity strategies to support business goals. A variety of security services include email and ransomware protection, mobile device security and more.

Acquire Affordable Information Governance with eGovernance^® Cloud Solutions

Successful businesses strive to increase data security and compliance while tapping into the benefits of big data to drive innovation. eGovernance^® provides the tools to do that efficiently and economically. With cloud-based archiving and eDiscovery solutions, comprehensive data security and compliance monitoring, organizations choose the options to meet their requirements.

Contact us today to explore affordable information governance solutions beginning at just $2.50 per user per month.

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