Maintaining compliance while remote working

As we spoke about previously, it has been a difficult year for businesses all over the globe. Many have made a sudden and unplanned transition to remote working and have had to provide the infrastructure to support this transition at very short notice. As well as businesses have done during this difficult time, it has been difficult to ensure that their employees are as productive as possible when not monitored and guided in the work setting. Collaboration and communication between members of the team can be challenging in a remote setting, but being sure you are compliant with the legal, social and financial standards when working from home can be an even bigger problem for businesses today.

Microsoft tools that help ensure compliance

Microsoft Compliance Manager is a feature in the Microsoft 365 compliance centre, it helps the management of your company’s compliance requirements with greater ease and convenience, it allows you to track, assign and verify your organisation’s regulatory compliance activities. Compliance Manager can take inventory of your data protection risks and manage complexities of implementing controls, whilst staying current with regulations and certifications.

Compliance Manager offers pre-built assessments for industry standards and regulations, with the option to build custom assessments to meet your compliance needs. It will also give you detailed guidance on what improvements you could adopt to help you comply with the standards of your organisation.

DLP Policy Tips inform workers instantly

Admins now have the ability to inform email senders that they may be about to pass along sensitive information that can be detected by the company’s policies-before they click send. This ensures compliance and avoids employees making mistakes when at home and perhaps not as concerned with data protection as normal. Many are under the illusion they are safe from data theft or loss when not in the office setting.

For example – DiamondJewellers is a company that has an internal policy to warn its employees any time they include sensitive information like a credit card number in emails. Lucy is a DiamondJewellers employee composing an email to Max, who works outside her organization. She includes credit card information in the mail, and immediately a DLP policy tip shows up in the message in Outlook.

Lucy now can decide whether to send the email with the potentially sensitive information or not, allowing her to make an informed decision before committing to the email.

Microsoft SharePoint and its contribution to ensuring compliance while remote working

Microsoft SharePoint allows employees to share, store, and edit work-related files in a secure environment. This allows organisations to have a centralised file storage system ensuring data is kept in one place. SharePoint can help teams whether remote working, in the office or a combination of the two; with one of its most impressive features being its contribution to the collaboration. SharePoint retains a single copy of a file stored within the Cloud, and with co-authoring capabilities, you can avoid lots of copies of a single document being exchanged by email for example, in turn allowing you to keep tabs on where your data is going. SharePoint helps different members of the team edit documents simultaneously without interference.

Another feature of SharePoint that can help you achieve more from your remote working and ensure compliance when working from home, is the ability to bring a team’s ideas together wherever they are based. It is obvious how this uses remote working to its maximum potential, but it also helps to ensure your staff are only communicating about work on a safe secure forum that you have the leadership of. Some team members may not be close physically, but it is important to still allow them to work together on a platform that can act as a safe bridge for their innovative ideas. This will help them build relationships and improve employee engagement, which can be of short supply when working from home especially during the pandemic.

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