How to Simplify and Automate Governance in Microsoft 365

by Peter Baddeley | Mar 10, 2021 | Blog, Home Page, Office 365 Governance

What is Good Governance?

Regardless of how large or small your organisation, or the volume of projects your organisation manages, it’s important to have clearly defined and structured operational governance in place when using IT enterprise suites, such as Microsoft 365.

With increasingly prescriptive data compliance regulations being enforced to protect business, customer and consumer data, ensuring your organisation adheres to these can be complex.

In this blog post, we take a look at what these governance challenges are and how to best address them.

Typical Governance Challenges in Microsoft 365

While it’s empowering to offer employees the freedom and benefits of the collaborative, communication and productivity features available within Microsoft 365, this comes with certain challenges, such as:

Too many workspaces: Whether these are Channels in Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Sites, or Office 365 Groups, if users keep creating them (and don’t follow naming conventions, or indeed, even check to see if the names already exist) without any sort of authorisation, this will lead to data sprawling out of control.
Manual verification requirements: Too many Workspaces that are pending manual authorisation not only overwhelms the IT team, but also leads to delays that ultimately become bottlenecks for work to start.
Excessive IT resources: If there are too many lengthy governance tasks to undertake, more resources will be required to carry these out in order to prevent long delays.
Security compliance for external users: Rigorous compliance regulations can be confusing and difficult to adhere to when it comes to giving external users access to business content.
Workspace admin and management: Manually monitoring and managing Workspace usage, recertifying permissions and tagging metadata can become cumbersome and tedious, especially if there’s a huge number of Workspaces to look after. Lifecycle management also becomes problematic, especially if the duration of these Workspaces isn’t clearly defined

What is Good Governance in Microsoft 365?

Good governance means your employees can confidently create Workspaces and leverage the powerful features available within Microsoft 365 to get work done productively and efficiently while keeping risks in check and controlling data sprawl.

Good governance can be achieved in Microsoft 365 through simplified, streamlined structures and implementing automated processes

The Benefits of Automated Governance in Microsoft 365

The ideal automated governance solution will fully support provisioning, compliance and lifecycle management of all Workspaces or Objects in Microsoft 365.

It should be able to give your organisation control over every setting that your users have available to them, to set up permissions, and allow requests to be passed though configurable approval workflows. An effective solution should also strike that crucial balance of leaving the native self-service options in Microsoft 365 turned on, but automatically manage user ownership and approval requests to ensure these get formally accepted and any necessary details be supplied for the approval workflow to be completed.

A Good Automated Microsoft 365 Governance Solution Should Offer:

Processes, IT Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and available services to be formalised to improve the quality of operations
Structured security and permissions to be enforced to reduce risk and ensure users have appropriate rights and access
Purposes of business content to be made clear for all users to bring any unintentional breaches to a minimum
Improved visibility of the content structure so users know exactly where they can find the content they are looking for and when they can use it – to help improve overall productivity, curb IT spend and boost ROI.