How to be compliant in a regulation-heavy world
Organisations are moving to cloud/digital records. Each day, more and more data is created globally. Governments are updating and creating new compliance and regulations as a result to ensure everyone’s personal data stays safe and secure.
The digital landscape is changing rapidly
And it’s no small task. Global data centre traffic is expected to triple and by 2021, it’s forecast to be 20.6 zettabytes a year. A zettabyte is equal to a trillion gigabytes. That’s equivalent to 36,000 years of watching HD video, or streaming Netflix’s entire catalogue over 3,000 times. Or, in more visual terms, if the gigabyte was your morning cup of tea, a zettabyte would be the Great Wall of China.
We’ve already seen it in the UK with the changes to the Data Protection Act and the arrival of GDPR. Moreover, there are also potentially hundreds of other regulations you have to meet. And this is not just to work locally in the UK, but also in Europe or the rest of the world as well.
Mix that in with the shift of cloud computing, the speed of change, and the cost of not meeting these regulatory requirements. You could potentially be spending a lot of time managing a confusing obstacle course of compliance and regulations.
How Microsoft can help
We have over 200 data centres globally, which are all subject to rigorous technical and business process engineering to ensure we’re compliant in many formal standards, such as ISO, Cloud Security Alliance, ENISA Information Assurance Framework, HIPPA, SOC 1 and SOC 2, and many more.
Ensuring compliance isn’t a one-and-done job, it means annual audits that take time and resources. That’s why we have a specific organisation whose full-time job it is to manage these continuous audits. This powerful team is working with you, behind the scenes, meaning you don’t spend all your time using precious resources.
Microsoft works hard to ensure this compliance. The built-in security takes these rules and automatically replicates it across your digital infrastructure. It even stretch as far as into your third-party companies.
Tools to make your life easier
- Service Trust Portal
The Service Trust Portal provides tools, content, and other resources about Microsoft’s security, compliance, and privacy practices. This is where you can find third-party audits on our online services. In addition, you can find more information on how we can help you track compliancy. - Compliance Manager
Compliance Manager makes it easy for you to track your organisation’s compliance across your cloud services. It makes it easy to stay compliant by providing you with an ongoing risk assessment and actionable insights on how you can improve on an easy to navigate dashboard. You can track, record, and assign compliance activities. This makes your compliance journey easy. It means your employees can spend more time on what’s important to your business, as well. ¹
Compliance by design
Being compliant is just as important as being secure. However, due to constant change and updates of regulations, this can sometimes seem more daunting. But ensuring you are compliant is good for your reputation and builds customer trust. Therefore, it’s an important thing to consider alongside your cybersecurity health. By building in security and compliance by design, we make it easier for you to meet the tough regulations you’re facing on a day-to-day basis.
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¹Compliance Manager is a dashboard that provides the Compliance Score and a summary of your data protection and compliance stature as well as recommendations to improve data protection and compliance. This is a recommendation, it is up to you to evaluate and validate the effectiveness of customer controls as per your regulatory environment. Recommendations from Compliance Manager and Compliance Score should not be interpreted as a guarantee of compliance.
