Microsoft 365 releases GDPR compliance and info protection features for its customers
The company is rolling out updates to its Compliance Manager and making it available to a more general audience.
In advance of the May 25, 2018 deadline for compliance of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Microsoft announced new features to help customers comply. The company announced the features in a blog post on Thursday.
An additional Microsoft Tech Community blog post credited to Tina Yang, provided more detail.
The company announced the following updates:
- Compliance Manager, which was first made available as a preview in November 2017, is now being made generally available to Azure, Dynamics 365, and Office 365 Business and Enterprise customers in public clouds
- Compliance Score — a feature of Compliance Manager that helps users assess ongoing risks — is now available for Office 365
- Azure Information Protection scanner, which allows customers to discover, classify, label and protect documents in hybrid and on-premises scenarios, as well as periodically scan on-premises data based on company-set policies, is also generally available
Compliance as a shared responsibility
“In this mobile-first and cloud-first world, Microsoft is committed to build and maintain a partnership with you to meet your security, compliance, and privacy needs,” Yang said in her post. “When your organization’s data was on-premises, it was 100 percent your responsibility to meet all regulatory requirements. As you move your data to a Microsoft Cloud service, such as Office 365, Azure, or Dynamics 365, we partner with you to help you achieve compliance under the shared responsibility model.”
Yang’s post says that Compliance Manager can now provide actionable insights from a certification/regulation view, which is meant to bridgethe gap between IT and compliance professionals by improving “the connection between the data protection capabilities and the regulatory requirements, so now you know which technology solutions you can leverage to meet certain compliance obligations.”
The updates will also simplify management of compliance activities, with the capability to create multiple assessments for each standard and regulation.
“Compliance Manager enables you to assign, track, and record your compliance activities, so you can collaborate across teams and manage your documents for creating audit reports more easily,” Yang said in her post.
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