Government: Today’s Challenges and Compliance Risks

For many government agencies across Australia and New Zealand, compliance is a challenging environment in the post-pandemic world. Since the pandemic started, we have seen an explosion of digital data and rapid adoption of the hybrid workplace. Married with constant and evolving legislation and regulations around compliance, it becomes increasingly complex, with a stretched budget, to manage the data ecosystem.  

Compliance means different things for different government agencies, including but not limited to:  

• protecting and governing your sensitive information 
• limiting privacy breaches 
• intellectual property theft  
• avoiding insider trading risk 
• responding to legal investigations and freedom of information requests, or  
• staying on top of changes in regulatory compliance.  

Here are some of the key compliance challenges government agencies are facing today. 

Working within silos 

In most government agencies (and other organisations), each department works quite independently from each other. This is an obstruction from having a holistic view of all our information assets and data information records. This makes it hard to identify sensitive data or records, apply the appropriate labels, access controls, and share the data across the public sector.  

Explosion of digital data 

Today, most information is being provided, stored, and transmitted digitally and is doing so at an increasing rate. In recent trends, we have seen this explosion of data across organisations to cater for the hybrid workplace. This is both on and off the organisation’s estate which is causing both technical and cultural challenges. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what your critical data is, where it is and how to manage and protect it. 

Budget restraints 

Since the start of the global pandemic, our frontline workers are under immense pressure. To help ease some of that pressure, government agencies are shifting their funding from back-end processes to support the frontline workers to deliver better government services by enabling employees to make the most from data and information.  

Where to from here? 

When you consider megatrends as well as a stretched budget and evolving legislation and regulations, it makes it a challenging environment to stay productive and compliant. Being compliant is not a matter of ticking boxes. A digital approach focuses on platforms that deliver compliance rather than point solutions. Leveraging automation and artificial intelligence also assists in maintaining compliance on an evergreen basis while also fostering cultural change. Employees across all departments are using Microsoft tools to collaborate, educate and empower each other to know, understand, and protect valuable data assets.  

Discover how you can get started or continue your compliance journey and register now for our fifth episode of our Microsoft data governance, risks and compliance and security webinar series. Hear from our expert panel who will take you through common challenges government agencies face with compliance and how Microsoft can help leverage automation and artificial intelligence to assist in your compliance journey.