Today’s Data Compliance Risks for Legal and IT

As we reach the other side of the pandemic, we have seen a rapid adoption of the hybrid work model as well as a change in how our customers engage with us. This cultural change is supported by a significant suite of existing and new tools that allow employees to work remotely and, in the office, engaging with customers and each other.  

However, this has also led to a significant increase in the volume, complexity of data and audits in the data ecosystem across multiple platforms from many locations. Microsoft can help your organisation manage risks, protect, and govern sensitive data, and respond to regulatory requirements. 

Compliance in this ‘new’norm’ not only mitigates risk, avoids legal consequences and hefty fines, but also protects your organisation’s reputation.  

A risk-based approach with increasing regulatory changes 

There are more than 200 new regulations every day that need to be reviewed to ensure that anything around sharing data with third parties, across jurisdictions or countries, data privacy for sensitive, personal, financial or medical information, data storage, policies and processes continues to comply with regulation changes in real-time. 

Our risk-based approach for compliance strategy for each industry includes the overview of that data journey – knowing our data, protecting our data, preventing data loss and governing our data.  

Here are some of the key compliance challenges that may be important in your industry.  

The ‘Great Resignation’ and data leakage 

You may have heard the phrase “The Great Resignation” of employees in the workplace post-pandemic who are now rethinking their careers and resigning in large numbers. With an increase in resignations, comes an increased risk of data leakage. Be it malicious or inadvertent, valuable data is going with them.  

Explosion of data and personal information 

Employees may be sharing personal or identifiable information, for example, via WhatsApp, inadvertently or on purpose without understanding the consequences to the business. Microsoft is already offering connectors within compliance that help monitor this across clouds as they happen to implement visibility and manage communications with those employees within the business.  

Not just an IT issue 

With an increase of complexity and obligations from a compliance standpoint, management heads are working more closely with the legal team to address specific compliance risks in their areas. IT and legal work together to respond to regulators’ requests and potential data loss incidents effectively and efficiently.  

Outsourcing key business processes to third parties 

Outsourcing key business processes to third party service providers (local or overseas) requires a complexity of best practice process, due diligence, and monitoring of those entities as to what they need to adhere under their own standards as well as our compliance and regulatory requirements.   

Where do we start? 

Microsoft are in the position to help you on your digital transformation journey. We can help by aligning appropriate compliance resources and tools to mitigate risks, protect and govern sensitive data, respond to regulatory requirements while also protecting your reputation in the future. 

Join us for our second episode in the Microsoft data governance, risks and compliance and security webinar series to find out more about trending risks and consequences for your business. Discover what your key compliance risks are so that you can lead with solutions based on what your data assets are. 

Be ahead of the curve and know what’s coming.